POSITIONS Berlin
In 2024, Dagmar Gertot participated in POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair, one of Germany’s leading international contemporary art fairs, held annually as part of Berlin Art Week. POSITIONS Berlin is a juried, curatorially structured platform focusing on conceptually rigorous contemporary practices, with an emphasis on painting, sculpture, installation, and interdisciplinary artistic research.
“Bathing in the Crocodile River”, which brought together works from multiple ongoing research-based bodies of work, including paintings, ceramics, graphic cycles, video art, sound elements, and a perfume composition. The presentation demonstrated a coherent artistic methodology centred on the anatomisation of psycho-emotional experience, ritual structures, and mythological systems as operative cultural mechanisms.
The Kid, the Anaconda, and the Total Solar Eclipse
“The Kid, the Anaconda, and the Total Solar Eclipse” is a research-based body of work examining states of fusion, oral-stage dynamics, and pre-individual subjectivity, where boundaries between bodies, identities, and agencies remain unstable.
The collection based on anthropological material, expedition notes, and mythological structures, focusing on moments in which merging becomes both nourishment and threat. Central to the works is the tension between protection and devouring, care and annihilation / a dynamic articulated through animal figures and chthonic metaphors.
The Kid functions as a figure of radical vulnerability and openness, situated at the threshold between dependence and emerging autonomy. The Anaconda operates as an ambivalent maternal and cosmological force: enclosing, suffocating, sheltering, and digesting simultaneously. Rather than a predator alone, it represents a system of containment in which subjectivity is suspended.
The motif of the Total Solar Eclipse introduces a temporal and perceptual collapse. It marks a moment when symbolic order is temporarily annulled, vision is interrupted, and orientation is lost.
Within the collection, the eclipse functions as a condition under which fusion becomes possible, a suspension of hierarchy, identity, and linear causality.
Formally, the works explore metamorphosis, ingestion, enclosure, and play, employing painting, sculpture, and mixed media to articulate psychological states that precede stable identity formation.
works
Joy II:
Reflection on the possibility of exchange between phenomena
The kiss of blue and stone figures; decapitation as a gesture of reciprocity.
Joy I:
Maintaining an elegant balance in dual nature with complex structures
Siamese twins as figures of dissociation and androgyny;
chaos as a rider balanced on the body.
Dissolution. Bathing in the Crocodile River
Central paintingSeven figures; a blue figure dissolving into the river, red figures dominated by hunger.
Reference to the Osirian myth: the body in water, devouring and transformation.
Feast
Ochre painting
A communal eating scene addressing ritual consumption, exchange, and collective embodiment.
Presence in a Complex Conversation
Red painting
Multiple figures; a black figure forced into comprehension, red figures holding a pomegranate.
Examination of power, digestion of meaning, and forced participation.
Joy III:
The Joy of Constancy
A study of learning and transformation without direct assimilation; chromatic intensification of form.
Ceramic works (associated with the collection)
Autoerotic Group
Ceramic composition
Osirian regeneration; closed fertility loop.
Play with Crocodiles in Full Waters
Ceramic / sculptural work
Referencing Sobek and Nile flood mythology: chaos, eros, fertility.
Heavy Heads of Grains
Ceramic group
Ritual dance; fertility cult imagery.
Black Lava Eating a Goat
Ceramic / mixed media
Goat figure consumed by lava; reciprocal consumption between bodies.
