FILILE

Laura Schawelka

With "Disclosure", Laura Schawelka is showing her fifth solo exhibition at FILIALE. The source material for her works are documentary images taken in 2014 at the "Glamourcon" in Long Beach, California, the 57th and final edition of the fan convention for glamor and playboy models. Laura Schawelka's interest here lies in the fetishization of the photographic transaction: the models did not sell their bodies, but (physical) images of them, which had often been created years or even decades before. In the context of Playboy models from the 1960s, Roland Barthes' noema description of the essence of photography, the "it-is-so-has-been", is reinterpreted. In her exhibition, Laura Schawelka uses photographs, sculptures and video to explore the complicity of photography in the consumerization of (female) bodies, the detachment through reproduction - from the body to the fetishized object/photo, and the question of whether this can also be a kind of liberation. Laura Schawelka studied under Tobias Rehberger at the Städelschule and completed her Master of Fine Arts at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia near Los Angeles. In addition to residencies in Paris and Vienna, she was awarded the Q21 viennacontemporary prize in 2019. In 2021 she received the Berlin Senate Research Grant and in 2022 the CCA Andratx Artist-in-Residence Grant. She lives and works in Berlin.