Cruise & Callas, Berlin, 2012

(...) One may be left asking what is the desired image for artists today? What roles are available and visible through fashion and or on stage? In post-revolutionary Russia, artists met the demand and challenge to build and make images for the state. Who is producing for whom now? Alexandra Hopf presents the viewer with multiple forms of identity. The identity of the artist is visible through her display of overalls, through her glass paintings of costume design, within the staged context of her film, and as announced in her posters. Translating the language of constructivism into her own she reminds us of how fashion and resulting representations of the self are framed and mediated. On or off stage the roles of the artist are equally real. In this exhibition Hopf portrays the identity of the artist as representing multiple unstable personas, whose roles are interchangeable based on variations from Russia 1922. The artist appropriates the past for the present within her unique futuristic historical language of intellectual production. (...)
Exerpt from Alexandra Hopf: A Private Collection by Annabelle von Girsewald

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