Under the sun I become of stone, then sand, then dust.

Dust that fills the air, fills your lungs, until you can’t breathe. Dust that obscures the sun in golden shine to fill the streets with twilight. Through the thick air reflections fall on the concrete like overripe fruits, sweet and juicy about to turn foul and acid, about to return to dirt.

My dust dances in the sun, I enter through the gaps, in all mouths, fill every hole.

Invite me in. A wet cloth at the window will not keep me out, I seep through the fabric, leaving traces behind, creating blots like blood forming red cherries on the lace.

“Life is a window of vulnerability.”(1) Donna Haraway whispers to me while the golden angel, solitary in the sky winks at me.

Golden dust shades the red sun. Maybe this time it won’t hurt me if I go out, if I just leave the space for a minute.

“I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can talk together freely and build our castles in the air.”(2)

The days are already getting shorter.

Sophie Schmidt is a transdisciplinary artist from Munich, Germany. Her performative installations and paintings are permeated by semifictional autobiographical narratives, by journalizing during travel in writing, drawing, and dreaming.

The body as a body that opens and connects is material and muse for her multimedia practice which spans painting, drawing, theater, literature, and music. Sophie creates prothesis as bodily complexifications and transformation machines, allowing for symbiosis of her body and the invented apparatus to merge into a hybrid prosthetic cyborg.

Her show “The world is now licked with the tongue“ at strobe presents the performance tingling entanglements and new paper works in ink and aquarelle which were created in New York, Sophie's last station of a 6 months travel grant for the US, awarded by the Bavarian State Ministry of Sciences, Research and the Arts.

Extending her body with a prosthesis especially created to explore the tingling entanglements and shared relations of being a body withing bodies, Sophie employs everyday objects like a colander and tape to interrogate and question the construction of a body, of her body.

- Johanna Strobel -

---------------
(1) Donna Haraway, The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies
(2) Bram Stoker, Dracula

Sophie Schmidt studied Philosophy and German Literature, as well as Art and Communication with Stephan Dillemuth and Ashley Hans Scheirl in Munich an Vienna. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Munich as Masterscholar of Stephan Huber.
Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Galerie Tobias Naehring, Berlin and Leipzig, Kunstverein Friedrichshafen, Treasure Hill Artist Village, Taipei, TWN, Domus Civica, Venice, KNUSTxKUNZ+, Munich and Josilda da Conceicao Gallery, Amsterdam amongst others. She has been included in exhibitions at MAMOTH, London, Lothringer 13 Halle, Munich, Jan van Eyck Academie, Folkwang University of Arts, Essen. Sophie has published several monographs