04.10.2024–06.01.2025

Manor Art Prize 2024 Ticino

Curated by
Francesca Benini
Taisse Grandi Venturi

With the support of
Manor

At the heart of Johanna Kotlaris’ creative process lie words: probed, written, spoken aloud, sung. In the videos, installations and performances by the artist, who often creates and plays fictitious characters, language becomes the expressive medium for reverting situations and moods. By juxtaposing pressing issues with minor everyday incidents, Kotlaris creates humorous short circuits with which she addresses contemporary issues, such as gender stereotypes, the sense of shame and the power structures that regulate our social interactions.

The exhibition project HUMERE was also spawned by an etymological play on words, as the Latin verb of the title literally means “to be wet” but also forms the root of the term “humour”. Playing with the ambivalence of the word, poised between irony and profundity, the film after which the exhibition is named and the accompanying installations compose a sound and visual panorama that reflects on the limits and potential of being “wet” in the broadest sense of the word: vulnerable, emotional, eccentric yet connected to others and open to change.

Using a cinematic language that nods at the genre of the musical, the film HUMERE narrates moments in the life of its eponymous protagonist: a zombie girl who, by coming across various relationships and testing different ways of getting close to the humans around her, unconsciously ponders interpersonal relationships, different ways of caring and the possibilities of social living, while showing us the paradoxes and extremes of the society in which we live. What forms of care and closeness can we offer and receive in an age marked by isolation and individualism?

Providing potential answers throughout the film, the screen is filled with characters who move within a distinctly prosaic and everyday reality, which nonetheless conceals both mysterious and recurring symbols, as well as references associated with iconography and religious imagery. But while these characters – the “pirate” with whom Humere falls in love; Max, the man with whom she establishes an ambiguous and ambivalent relationship; and even the beautician Désirée, who paradoxically ends up helping her to rediscover herself through body care – talk and interact with each other, they do not seem to engage in real communication, as if each and every one of them were speaking at different frequencies, unable to find a true harmony. Alternating dialogues and pop songs, the perfect products of the failing system whose cracks HUMERE reveals, the sound component of the film is central and accompanies the viewer throughout the exhibition.

Made using drywall panels, sails and ropes, the new serie of installations on view recalls the inner yet physical shipwreck that Humere faces on her “path of development” within the film. Whether engraved using a sgraffito-like technique, imprinted with a photosensitive paint that reacts to sunlight, or impregnated with synthetic resin, the drywall surfaces capture the ambience and atmosphere of the film. Visual fragments somewhere between sculpture and painting, the installation groups thus create a semantic continuity between the physical space occupied by the viewer and the space of the film that Humere inhabits with her eccentric posture, whether it be city views as in the case of the architecture of Berlin’s Government District, or expanses of water full of lake detritus.

Between these images are also few words, fictitious clothing brands recalling the costumes of the film and claiming the exhibition space for themselves, moving from the private and intimate dimension they occupy in the film to the broader social and collective sphere. Some garments treated with synthetic resins are also on display, abandoned to the impossible eternal task of drying out.

The installations evoke human infrastructures for reappropriation, construction sites – internal or external, private and social – and, ultimately, all that complex construction and destruction work we perform over the course of a lifetime. Moreover, by allowing water to metaphorically infiltrate the exhibition space, they reiterate and underscore the element’s importance in HUMERE. A common denominator of most of the film’s scenes, water also defines the existential condition of the protagonist, underscoring the symbolic contrast between its allegorical meanings, associated with birth and the flow of life, and Humere, a living-dead woman whose enigmatic end the viewer is invited to ponder.


Johanna Kotlaris (*1988) is based in Zürich. Her works have been shown among others at Ninfe, Campane subacquee e Pesci giganti, Bally Foundation, Lugano (2024); we will be better we will be better we will, KIOSKO Galeria, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia (2023); Swiss Performance Art Award, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne (2022); Prix Mobilière, Art Gèneve, Geneva (2022); Cantonale Berne Jura, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern (2021); Les Urbaines, Arsenic Theatre, Lausanne (2021); Laube zur schiefen Lage, Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich (2021). Awards and grants include: Prix Mobilière (shortlisted, 2022), Swiss Performance Art Award (shortlisted, 2022), UBS Culture Foundation Visual Arts Grant (2020), Patronagefonds by Kunstverein Basel (2018 & 2017) and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie Award (2013). She was artist in residence at Rupert, Vilnius; ABA-Air Berlin Alexanderplatz; Stiftung BINZ39, Zurich; F+F Kunstatelier by the City of Zurich and the Berlin residency by the Canton of Zurich Department of Culture. Johanna Kotlaris holds a BA Design from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam and a MFA cum laude from the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam.

Johanna Kotlaris is the winner of the Ticino edition of the Manor Art Prize 2024. Established in 1982, the award is one of the most prestigious of the Swiss contemporary art world.


The catalogue
To coincide with the exhibition, the book Jessica Jessica Jessica was published by Jungle Books in collaboration with MASI Lugano. The publication was conceived by the artist as a further work and consists of a collection of letters addressed to Jessica.

1 The weather… the everyday stress…
2024
Sails, nautical rope, drywall, reflective fabric
Dimensions variable

2 I just wanna be chill and easy, I don’t wanna get into trouble
2024
UV sensitive paint, cotton socks and epoxy resin on drywall
261 x 420 cm

3 Are you trying to kill me?
2024
Sail, nautical rope, drywall, reflective fabric
Dimensions variable

4 Tell me what you want baby, come on!
2024
Epoxy resin on drywall
260 x 180 cm

5 TRA(there’s something I don’t know that’s stuck in my throat)VEL
2024
Epoxy resin on drywall
260 x 720 cm

6 You said you’re sad, you said you’re sad, I’m gonna make you better
2024
Plaster, couscous, acrylic paint, epoxy resin
5 x 15 x 12 cm

7 The sun is standing at about 35° from the ground. Just the way it should be at this time of year and day
2024
UV sensitive paint on drywall
200 x 360 cm

8 Yea good. Great actually
2024
Jeans jacket and epoxy resin on drywall
261 x 134 cm

9 SAINT
2024
UV sensitive paint on drywall
200 x 720 cm

10 Tabula Rasa
2024
Dry roses, epoxy resin
5 x 45 x 74,5 cm

11 2(X)IST
2024
Sail, nautical rope, drywall, reflective fabric
Dimensions variable

12 HUMERE
2024
Digital film, color, sound, 53’46’’

The film starts every hour.
First screening:
Tue - Fri:    11 AM
Sat - Sun: 10 AM
This film includes scenes of violence, nudity, and drug use. The language is sometimes explicit.

For all the works: courtesy of the artist