Human bodies in mystical spaces

If you enter the labyrinth of thin strips of fabric, you don't have to worry about getting lost. The unmistakable spiral path leads directly into the interior of the installation, which was set up by the French artist Alix Marie (33) in the Phoxxi in the Deichtorhallen.

Contrary to expectations, the Cretan Minotaur is not lurking inside the spiral labyrinth, but Marie deals with another topic from ancient mythology: the underworld river Styx, which also appears in the form of a goddess of the same name. "It is at once deity and flow, body and part of geography," says the artist.

Styx is also a symbol of the female body in Marie's work. The blue-painted cloths that make up the labyrinth are covered with abstract, feminine rounded shapes resembling waves or whirlpools. In the center, the patterns condense into a human skeleton, whose white bones stand out like on an X-ray.

Here the goddess takes on an anatomically tangible form, while at the same time flowing around the world of the dead as a river. The work of art continues in the small adjoining room. A video installation shows Styx quite concretely as a naked, winged woman, embodied by Marie's collaborator Nina Boukhrief.

In a crouching position, she remains almost motionless, only her chest rises and falls as she breathes. Acting as the boundary between this world and the afterlife, the voice of the river deity fills the room with philosophical reflections on life and death.

While “Styx” can be seen in the Phoxxi gallery, the group of works “Daylight Studio, Dark Room Studio” by photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya (40) is on display on the ground floor. In contrast to Marie's explicitly female position, the American exclusively deals with the male body: According to curator Ingo Taubhorn, Sepuya is one of the world's most important artists of queer photography. All of the works show male nudes appearing individually or in pairs in self-chosen positions. The photographer leaves his studio to the models as a protected space for intimate, erotically charged encounters.

With his aesthetic stagings, equipped with historical props, Sepuya takes up the classic studio photography of the 19th century on the one hand and dares experiments on the other. The scenes are often illuminated with red safety lamps, causing the figures to become blurred in the longer exposure times. Elsewhere, the use of mirrors broadens the view. "I want to encourage people to think in new ways about the structures of photography, the portrait and queer sociality," explains the photographer.