LÆNNERTON x Feta Felice Bundesweh (2024)
It’s hard to look away from Sonja Yakovleva’s work. Using paper as her primary medium, she builds large-scale cut-out compositions filled with bodies, gestures and encounters that refuse to behave politely. Sexuality is present, but so are humor, confrontation and a persistent interest in who is allowed to look, desire and take up space. Her silhouetted figures pull from a wide range of visual sources: pornography, pop culture, advertising, fairy tales and mythology. She reworks these familiar visual codes into something that reads as seductive and political and funny and unsettling all at once.
The delicate, handcrafted quality of paper cutting sits in sharp tension with what it actually depicts—bare skin, breasts, vulvas, phalluses, bodies posed with open sexuality or unapologetic confidence. Women touch themselves, one another and their counterparts without restraint; the figures resist any pressure to behave or stay inside the limits usually placed on them. What first reads as playful or confrontational gradually raises deeper questions—about shame, desire, gender and who is allowed to take up space so assuredly.
At the core of Yakovleva’s practice there always seems to be the question of power: specifically, the power that gets written onto—and wielded through—the (female) body. Her tongue-in-cheek, pop-feminist visual language adds up to something like a statement of principle: a case for female corporeality on its own terms.
Beyond her individual practice, Yakovleva is a founding member of the collective KVTV—short for KulturvotzenTV (Engl. “art cunt tv”)—which produces exhibition reviews on Instagram (German speakers: don’t sleep on this!) and organizes exhibition and publishing projects. Her work has appeared at venues including Kunstraum Potsdam, Kunstpalais Erlangen, Museum Bensheim and Klingspor Museum Offenbach.
When we asked Sonja for a track, she chose “Bundeswehr” by Feta Felice & LÆNNERTON. A track she discovered on SoundCloud and has been listening to during her workout sessions at the gym.
For Yakovleva, the song feels both funny and absurd, particularly against the backdrop of the current debate around compulsory military service and the increasingly urgent (and often bewildering) question of what it means to be a man in the 21st century. In other words: a track for lifting weights while thinking about masculinity, the Bundeswehr and the strange performance of being a man today.
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