IGNITE @ GLOGAUAIR OPEN STUDIO, BERLIN, SEPTEMBER 2023
For the Open Studios exhibition held at the Glogau AIR residency, the studio was transformed into an exhibition space for a two-day event. The goal was to present works created during the first three months of a residency term at Glogau AIR, during which Lena Zak and her fellow duo resident, Marco Dvorak, explored the theme of burnout as an intricate, personally lived-through, intimate experience and a common result of many pressures in our social environment, as well as our own inherited beliefs. Lena prepared works in painting, object, and text, representing some of the phases of burnout, such as chaos, overwhelm, hope, the feeling of being in a dark place, and, finally, a quite literal visual representation of burnout as a very fragile state of being. To create some of these works, various ways to use fire for the desired result were researched, as yet another destructive method mobilised in Lena's artistic practice.