Galactic Jam

Instead of placing the physical presence of the body on display, the artist tends to synthesize it by the use of material reference – blood, nails, hair – which possesses an implicit, rather than manifest, relationship with human beings. Even though the artwork is devoid of human presence, a presence is always perceived, it hovers obsessively, emanating an aura of participation, of adherence. This drawing on real human paths, imbued with a strong, viscerally symbolic charge, is easily identifiable in the works Everything I Always Wanted to Tell You (2013) and Galactic Jam (2025), where the suggestion of hair codifies the artistic message. Everything I Always Wanted To Tell You is a tribute to the artist’s maternal grandparents, who were of Ukrainian origin, and their life experience, which was unfortunately marked by dramatic historical moments such as the Holodomor (the great famine of 1932-1933), the German occupation, and Soviet subjugation. To them, Nadia Kaabi-Linke dedicates the pages of a diary left empty, in silent pain, pages that, nevertheless, strive for a solemn sensorial absorption. It is the hair that transforms into the lines of the page, waiting for words. Despite the formal approach of a minimalist setting, the work still manages to surprise with an evocative physicality, which erases the material boundaries of the body – freeing them in space, in the form of delicate and fine hair. Of a similar stylistic accent, Galactic Jam is part of a series in progress where hair, with its emotional significance, portrays a terrain of exploration and contemplation, almost of an ancestral recall. The aesthetic essentialism, which breaks with the need for a figurative construct in favor of an extreme visual simplification […].