EMMA HUMMERHIELM CARLÉN. By The Wall
Our film is dedicated to the artistic practice of the recognition-award winner of the STRABAG ART Award International 2025 Emma Hummerhielm Carlén, whose works unfold at the intersection of space, material, and image. Drawing on her background in architecture, she does not understand space as a mere backdrop, but as an active collaborator – a kind of productive force that fundamentally shapes the creation of her works. In her practice, space becomes something that acts, responds, and generates meaning.
The film offers insight into the artist’s working process, which is both physical and experimental. Analog photographs are altered through technical interventions, refracted through light, and then cast in wax. This process – a combination of photographic image, material transformation, and sculptural framing – produces works that resist fixed interpretation. Wax, a material suspended between solidity and dissolution, lends the images a fragile presence: they seem as if they could change again at any moment, as if their state remains fundamentally provisional.
At the center of her imagery are motifs of almost casual familiarity: flowers, curtains, doors, fleeting moments of light. These are images that evade clear readability and, precisely through this, open up a particular sense of ambiguity. They move between meaning and the loss of meaning, between recognizability and abstraction – inviting viewers to question their own perception.
The film portrays an artist who works through subtle shifts: between image and object, between permanence and transience, between visibility and dissolution. Within this state of suspension, a practice unfolds that is less concerned with definitive statements than with spaces of experience – moments in which meaning emerges only through the interplay of material, space, and gaze.
The exhibition By the Wall by the artist will be on view from March 16 to April 10, 2026 at the STRABAG ART Site in the Gironcoli-Kristall, Donau-City-Straße 9, 1220 Vienna.
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