ARTIST STATEMENT
My work “The Architecture of Suppression” series grew out of my own experience of how language sits on the body. From an early age I learned the familiar vocabulary directed at women: too loud, too emotional, too sexual, too much. These comments do not simply disappear, they are stored in posture, in tension, in the ways we edit ourselves before we speak.
In “The Architecture of Suppression” I fragment and reassemble the female body into a dark, crouched silhouette. The figure has no face, no conventional place for speech. Instead, mouths appear away from where they “belong” – between the legs, at the feet – echoing how women’s voices are often pushed into sexualized, ridiculous or marginalized zones. The body becomes a kind of architecture built out of containment: crossed arms both protect and restrain, while the displaced mouths refuse to close.
By working with digital collage based on photography, I want to create images that feel minimal yet politically charged. The piece is not an illustration of victimhood, but a quiet form of dissent. It asks what happens when we can no longer perform politeness, when the voice that has been told to stay silent finds new, unsettling ways to appear.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
I am a Cologne, Germany based visual artist working with mixed media, collage and conceptual photography. My practice focuses on identity, emotional tension, and the subtle ways people navigate visibility and self-expression in contemporary society. Using my own body and the bodies of others as a starting point, I fragment the figure into silhouettes, arms, mouths and empty faces, and then reassemble these elements into symbolic structures. I am deeply interested in emotions, how people make contact with their own emotional states, how they are taught to suppress or edit them, and how this inner negotiation becomes visible in posture, gesture and repetition.
I work mainly with digital mixed media, photography, digital drawing and collage, which I often translate into physical prints, objects and experimental installations. Moving between the digital image and the tangible artwork mirrors the shift from internal feeling to outward form. Minimal compositions, reduced color palettes and recurring forms allow small shifts in gesture to carry psychological weight.
My work has been included in group exhibitions in Europe, with recent selections for show in Edinburgh. I am currently expanding my visual language into more experimental works that function both in image and space.
© Gali Orlen