Description
ARTIST STATEMENT
My artistic practice explores feminism, violence, care, digital culture, and the construction of identity through conceptual visual narratives. Working with symbolism, contemporary media imagery, historical references, and object-based interventions, I investigate how female bodies are shaped, controlled, protected, consumed, and politicized within society.
A recurring focus in my work is the tension between beauty and violence, intimacy and surveillance, vulnerability and resistance. Recent projects engage with femicide, digital childhood, social conditioning, and the visual language of power. By combining familiar cultural symbols with unsettling shifts in context, I aim to create spaces of reflection that expose hidden structures of normalization and collective desensitization.
My background in history, philosophy, psychology, and ethics strongly informs my practice and research-based approach.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Raphaela Stella Leys is an Austrian emerging visual artist based in Innsbruck. Her conceptual work engages with feminism, social violence, care, digital culture, and symbolic systems of representation. Drawing from art history, philosophy, ethics, and contemporary visual media, she develops image-based works that examine vulnerability, control, femininity, and collective perception.
Leys studied History at the University of Innsbruck and later completed teacher training studies in History, Psychology, Philosophy, Social Studies, and Political Education at the University of Vienna. In 2024, she completed her Master’s Degree in Ethics for School and Profession with distinction.
Her current artistic practice focuses on conceptual series addressing femicide, digital identity, childhood, and the politics of visual culture.
© Raphaela Stella Leys