CURRENT
Xenia Lesniewski - "Bread, Salt & Roses"
Xenia Lesniewski is a German-born, Vienna-based ultra-contemporary artist whose practice spans medias, roles, and spaces—at once an artist, a curator, a scenographer of the everyday. Her artistic exploration weaves between art and the everyday, conjuring a delicate line that both divides and unites them. In this liminal space, they coexist—simultaneously probing and reflecting on the socio-political issues that shape our reality. Lesniewski’s objects do both—they reflect and reshape, they reveal and displace.
For this site-specific exhibition “Bread, Salt & Roses”, she has constructed a kind of mise-en-scène: a hybrid space that oscillates between the gallery space and a private interior, a site of domestic gestures and public questions. “The studio is not just a place of production,” wrote Mike Kelley, “it is a social and psychological space.” Lesniewski brings this sensibility forward—here, the studio bleeds into the gallery, and the gallery becomes an extension of everyday life.
Objects are charged with a quiet but insistent energy. “Every object tells a story if you know how to read it,” said Barbara Kruger—and Lesniewski’s arrangements invite precisely that kind of slow, attentive reading, the more you read the room the more you can discover. Beds, fabrics, machines, structures—each becomes a vessel for something more than form; each carries a residue of use, of context, of coded meaning.
There is, too, a comic undercurrent—a kind of absurdist softness that resists the heaviness of discourse. “Humor can be a strategy of resistance,” Louise Bourgeois once said. Lesniewski allows humor to seep in through the cracks, the mismatches, the subtle disruptions in routine.
Her work invites us to dwell in these contradictions: the poetic within the banal, the political within the domestic. “The personal is political,” said Carol Hanisch, and Lesniewski’s practice makes this felt—not as a slogan, but as a spatial proposition.
And still, as we move through this porous space of gestures and interruptions, one question echoes quietly: Is it too much to ask for roses with the bread?
Zé Ortigão