CV
Sophie Utikal is a textile artist and a mother, living and working in Berlin. She was born in Tallahassee, US and grew up in Mainz, Germany. She studied contextual painting with Ashley Hans Scheirl at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2014-2019) and is a co-editor of the book Anti-Colonial Fantasies/Decolonial Strategies (2017). Her artworks have been shown throughout Europe, including Kristinstads Konsthal (2022), Kunsthalle Vienna (2021), Mediterranea Biennale 19 in San Marino (2021), Museion Bolzano (2018). Her most recent solo show was at Kunstraum Innsbruck, AT (2023) and at Galerie im Turm, Berlin, Germany (2020). Her work is part of the public collection of the federal republic of Germany and private collection of Museion, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bolzano, in South Tyrol, Italy.
Sophie Utikal ist eine Textilkünstlerin und Mutter, die in Berlin lebt und arbeitet. Sie wurde in Tallahassee, USA, geboren und wuchs in Mainz, Deutschland, auf. Sie studierte kontextuelle Malerei bei Ashley Hans Scheirl an der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien (2014-2019) und ist Mitherausgeberin des Buches Anti-Colonial Fantasies/Decolonial Strategies (2017). Ihre Kunstwerke wurden in ganz Europa gezeigt, darunter Kristinstads Konsthal (2022), Kunsthalle Wien (2021), Mediterranea Biennale 19 in San Marino (2021), Museion Bolzano (2018). Ihre letzte Einzelausstellung fand im Kunstraum Innsbruck, AT (2023) und in der Galerie im Turm, Berlin, Deutschland (2020) statt. Ihre Arbeiten sind Teil der öffentlichen Sammlung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und der Privatsammlung des Museion, Museum für moderne und zeitgenössische Kunst in Bozen, in Südtirol, Italien.
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Artist Statement
In my work we often see groups of women who have walked to the ends of the world together. There they are now building a new life for themselves with their environment. They all know that they have already left one (or many) behind. Even if one of the women lives alone on a piece of fabric, they all belong together. Whether I actually mean different people by that, or different species or maybe even myself in the diversity and inconsistency of my character, is actually not that important. It's about the encounter with - in each other, to oneself and our surroundings - it's about encounters quite fundamentally, together.
Article by Dalia Maini in Arts of the working class edition 15
Decolomania
Their eyes are pierced by needles
On Sophie Utikal’s tapestries nestling the cracks of history
by Dalia Maini
To look into these fabrics is to look through windows, into landscapes where black and brown bodies can freely experience relief from all the pressures of history that were carried over millennia. Sophie Utikal’s roots branch from postcolonial feminism and entangle biographical episodes in intersectionalist claims. Indeed, her bodies of women struggle together and keep the embers of revolution burning, in coalition with the powers of nature and cosmological spirituality. Hence her investigation on the alienation of the black and brown skin stems from the autohystoria‐teoría by Gloria E. Anzaldúa, a practice of self‐knowledge which attributes the development of social and relational agency to personal experiences, while producing resistance and friction. This biographical and healing trait is very visible in her textile Curando/ Catching my own tears (2020) where the shape of a female body, on an ocher sunny background surrounded by light lines of smoke, uses her hands as vessels for tears.
The tread of her work, indeed, brings to the present the ghostly presence of the past, which emerges from the textiles in images of collective empowerment rituals and practices of care in the hold of togetherness. This process of giving back dignity and new meanings to the past, in a future to be built in solidarity, is embedded in the sewing technique she employs. It is based on a South American tradition, learned by Utikal from the women of her family. Contrary to the Western conception, textile manufacturing and weaving are highly respected within matriarchal cultures and are symbols of wisdom, creativity and intelligence. The fil rouge that marks Utikal’s textiles are thick black stitches, which join together colorful and light patches of fabric, outlining a wholeness, which soul is still puzzled by pain and alienation. The cordon recreates the scars that, tearing apart the collective memory of black and brown bodies, connects them in the experience of oppression.
The stories, sewed in her contemporary arrays, are based on her own experiences of migration as a woman of color from the US to Austria and Germany, where she currently lives. To solve her traumatic experiences Utikal depicts oniric landscapes, where the tension between the epigenetic trauma of cultural and identity eradication and the individual process of healing is shaped in self-portraits. Appealing to the decolonized gaze and non-rational forms of knowledge she reproduces her own body in multiple textile bodies. Those are depicted in deep relation with ecological devastation, as in Holding on (2021), or with non-human kinships, as in Healing Parts (2020), breaking and expanding the dichotomic western definition of identity. Moreover, the tender torsion and the postures of togetherness in which Utikal places her fabric characters, as in Sterile soil, Poison sky (2020), disclose the deep core of their origins and reclaim their colored souls, while more-than-human constellations, as in PMS (2017), homage a spirituality shaded by the gloom of history. Utikal’s light textile works bear the mission to release the hidden women buried in the heart of every black woman and in the cracks of history. Presumed dead, we can hear their soft whispers and the rasp of their parchment skin fighting the folds of their shroud. Their eyes are pierced by needles, their eyelids, two fluttering moths.
CV
Sophie Utikal is a textile artist and a mother, living and working in Berlin. She was born in Tallahassee, US and grew up in Mainz, Germany. She studied contextual painting with Ashley Hans Scheirl at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2014-2019) and is a co-editor of the book Anti-Colonial Fantasies/Decolonial Strategies (2017). Her artworks have been shown throughout Europe, including Kristinstads Konsthal (2022), Kunsthalle Vienna (2021), Mediterranea Biennale 19 in San Marino (2021), Museion Bolzano (2018). Her most recent solo show was at Kunstraum Innsbruck, AT (2023) and at Galerie im Turm, Berlin, Germany (2020). Her work is part of the public collection of the federal republic of Germany and private collection of Museion, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bolzano, in South Tyrol, Italy.
Sophie Utikal ist eine Textilkünstlerin und Mutter, die in Berlin lebt und arbeitet. Sie wurde in Tallahassee, USA, geboren und wuchs in Mainz, Deutschland, auf. Sie studierte kontextuelle Malerei bei Ashley Hans Scheirl an der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien (2014-2019) und ist Mitherausgeberin des Buches Anti-Colonial Fantasies/Decolonial Strategies (2017). Ihre Kunstwerke wurden in ganz Europa gezeigt, darunter Kristinstads Konsthal (2022), Kunsthalle Wien (2021), Mediterranea Biennale 19 in San Marino (2021), Museion Bolzano (2018). Ihre letzte Einzelausstellung fand im Kunstraum Innsbruck, AT (2023) und in der Galerie im Turm, Berlin, Deutschland (2020) statt. Ihre Arbeiten sind Teil der öffentlichen Sammlung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und der Privatsammlung des Museion, Museum für moderne und zeitgenössische Kunst in Bozen, in Südtirol, Italien.
Artist Statement
In my work we often see groups of women who have walked to the ends of the world together. There they are now building a new life for themselves with their environment. They all know that they have already left one (or many) behind. Even if one of the women lives alone on a piece of fabric, they all belong together. Whether I actually mean different people by that, or different species or maybe even myself in the diversity and inconsistency of my character, is actually not that important. It's about the encounter with - in each other, to oneself and our surroundings - it's about encounters quite fundamentally, together.
Article by Dalia Maini in Arts of the working class edition 15
Decolomania
Their eyes are pierced by needles
On Sophie Utikal’s tapestries nestling the cracks of history
by Dalia Maini
To look into these fabrics is to look through windows, into landscapes where black and brown bodies can freely experience relief from all the pressures of history that were carried over millennia. Sophie Utikal’s roots branch from postcolonial feminism and entangle biographical episodes in intersectionalist claims. Indeed, her bodies of women struggle together and keep the embers of revolution burning, in coalition with the powers of nature and cosmological spirituality. Hence her investigation on the alienation of the black and brown skin stems from the autohystoria‐teoría by Gloria E. Anzaldúa, a practice of self‐knowledge which attributes the development of social and relational agency to personal experiences, while producing resistance and friction. This biographical and healing trait is very visible in her textile Curando/ Catching my own tears (2020) where the shape of a female body, on an ocher sunny background surrounded by light lines of smoke, uses her hands as vessels for tears.
The tread of her work, indeed, brings to the present the ghostly presence of the past, which emerges from the textiles in images of collective empowerment rituals and practices of care in the hold of togetherness. This process of giving back dignity and new meanings to the past, in a future to be built in solidarity, is embedded in the sewing technique she employs. It is based on a South American tradition, learned by Utikal from the women of her family. Contrary to the Western conception, textile manufacturing and weaving are highly respected within matriarchal cultures and are symbols of wisdom, creativity and intelligence. The fil rouge that marks Utikal’s textiles are thick black stitches, which join together colorful and light patches of fabric, outlining a wholeness, which soul is still puzzled by pain and alienation. The cordon recreates the scars that, tearing apart the collective memory of black and brown bodies, connects them in the experience of oppression.
The stories, sewed in her contemporary arrays, are based on her own experiences of migration as a woman of color from the US to Austria and Germany, where she currently lives. To solve her traumatic experiences Utikal depicts oniric landscapes, where the tension between the epigenetic trauma of cultural and identity eradication and the individual process of healing is shaped in self-portraits. Appealing to the decolonized gaze and non-rational forms of knowledge she reproduces her own body in multiple textile bodies. Those are depicted in deep relation with ecological devastation, as in Holding on (2021), or with non-human kinships, as in Healing Parts (2020), breaking and expanding the dichotomic western definition of identity. Moreover, the tender torsion and the postures of togetherness in which Utikal places her fabric characters, as in Sterile soil, Poison sky (2020), disclose the deep core of their origins and reclaim their colored souls, while more-than-human constellations, as in PMS (2017), homage a spirituality shaded by the gloom of history. Utikal’s light textile works bear the mission to release the hidden women buried in the heart of every black woman and in the cracks of history. Presumed dead, we can hear their soft whispers and the rasp of their parchment skin fighting the folds of their shroud. Their eyes are pierced by needles, their eyelids, two fluttering moths.