Kronenboden Berlin
Schwedenstraße 16
13357 Berlin

Opening: Saturday 25 January 2025, 6pm
Exhibition continues until 23 February 2025

A Beauty Odyssey brings together works in photography and film by three artists – Elina Brotherus, Marta Michalowska and Rosaliina Paavilainen. The exhibition includes two bodies of work by Elina and Marta made during their recent trip to Oman, where they photographed and performed in each other’s images set within monumental mountainous landscapes both awe-inspiring and troubling, alien and familiar, unmoved yet shaped by human cultures ancient and contemporary. While Rosaliina presents her simultaneously playful and unsettling short film that lends the exhibition its title – A Beauty Odyssey. Completed in 2024, the film looks at the brutality of beauty rituals violently shaping the body of the protagonist, performed by the artist, to freeze in time her youthful appearance.

Elina Brotherus works in photography and moving image. Her work has been alternating between autobiographical and art-historical approaches. Photographs dealing with the human figure and the landscape, the relation of the artist and the model, gave way to images on subjective experiences in her recent bodies of work Annonciation and Carpe Fucking Diem. In her current work she is revisiting Fluxus event scores and other written instructions for performance-oriented art of the 1950s-70s. Another ongoing interest is photographing in iconic houses by architects like Alvar Aalto, Hundertwasser and Michel Polak. Brotherus takes roles of various imagined characters, thus bringing a tranquil human presence to the spaces. Elina has been exhibiting widely since 1997 and her work is represented in major public collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, MAXXI, Rome, Fondacion ARCO, Madrid, Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, and Museum Folkwang, Essen, to name a few.

Marta Michalowska is an artist, writer, editor and producer working across London, UK, and the Ardèche, France. Her practice, spanning photography, film, installation and text, is in dialogue with places, especially those with complex and contested past and/or present. Her recent hybrid piece, weaving diary, poetry, prose and images, titled notes from/on/beyond a border was published by Strings in the very first volume of a new online literary magazine. Marta’s writing has been previously published in Migrant Journal and Litro, as well as in collections Interior Realms, Concrete and Ink: Storytelling and the Future of Architecture, and A Love Affair. Her works in photography and moving image have been exhibited at Kronenboden (Berlin), The Wapping Project (London), Miedzy Nami (Warsaw), RIBA Gallery (Liverpool), and AOP Gallery (London). Alongside her creative practice, she is Director of The Wapping Project. Until the end of 2022, she was Co-Director of Theatrum Mundi.

Rosaliina Paavilainen is a visual artist and filmmaker with a primary focus on documentary and experimental cinema. In her works, she expand questions established societal practices and norms, addressing topics such as family, relationships, and the body. Paavilainen graduated in 2022 with a master ’s degree in visual arts from the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki. Her moving image works have been featured in exhibitions and film festivals in recent years: Nordisk Panorama (2024), Helsinki International Film Festival – Love & Anarchy (2024), Tampere Film Festival (2024), Galleria Huuto, Helsinki, (2023), Doclisboa, Lisbon (2023), Docpoint, Helsinki, Finland (2021), Mänttä Art Weeks, Mänttä, Finland (2021), reGeneration4, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland (2020), and Young Artists 2019, Taidehalli, Helsinki, Finland (2019). During the summer of 2023, Paavilainen participated in an international mentoring program at the Saari Residence, jointly produced by The Wapping Project and the Kone Foundation.