Anna Bochkova"s solo exhibition at artothek - Raum für junge Kunst In Köln.

Anna Bochkova: Amoured Concrete
10 May  – 22. June, 2024
artothek - Raum für junge Kunst,  Köln

The title of the exhibition plays with the English term for reinforced concrete "armoured concrete" and the French word "l'amour" for love. What is playfully combined in the neologism "Amoured Concrete" often seems incompatible and contradictory in reality: tender emotions and repellent concrete façades of prefabricated buildings. Individual relationships and ever-same modular architecture. Hope and decay. But it is precisely in these tensions that there is much that is utopian, says artist Anna Bochkova. She spent her childhood in an Eastern European "slab" and proves with her multi-layered installation that art has the power to shift dimensions and bring diverging feelings together in surprising new ways.

In the artothek, Bochkova places fragile ceramic figures, which meet in poetic and tender gestures, between prefabricated buildings made of simple grey cardboard. In the context of so-called "social hotspots", she places the longing for love, innocence and a protected togetherness. The figures carry flowers into the spaces between the buildings to sow tenderness and beauty, to plant something there. This touches and shakes up the images and ideas that we associate with prefabricated housing estates, and perhaps also with Eastern Europe.

The installation is a small world that invites you to immerse in it. It plays with contradictions and allusions, uses materials and gestures. Although "hope" is certainly one of the central messages, this hope is born in pain. A pain that Anna Bochkova artistically absorbs and transforms, so that in the end the lightness and simplicity of the aesthetic statement remain in the memory.