Pink sexy gym boot camp, 2024
Paper Cut, Photo cardboard
265 x 295 cm

Ohne Titel, 2024
Paper Cut, Photo cardboard
680 cm / ⌀ 47 cm

INSTAREXIE, 2024
Ceiling installation of 240 paper cuts, photo cardboard, color foil
je 68 x 68 cm

Courtesy the artist

Sonja Yakovleva has been perfecting the art of paper cutting for more than ten years, transferring this historical medium into the very present. She lives with intensity and, at the same time, is a chronicler of the present. Her view of the world, of people and of everyday culture is precise and lustful, noticing and collecting patterns of human behaviour that she captures in her drawings and condenses in her silhouettes. Her art is full-bodied and life-affirming — the contribution of an “embedded artist” — and she gives an independent account of contemporary pop culture, for which she immerses herself into current events.

For this exhibition at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Sonja Yakovleva has focussed her attention and her extensive research on new areas. All the works in the exhibition have been newly created and developed as a monographic presentation across three rooms. It is the power of the body that the artist examines: on the one hand, the body as a mouldable material for the self-presentation on social media and, on the other, the body of those who go on strike in urban spaces.

Yakovleva opens the exhibition with oversized figures from the cult of the body that is so prevalent in the world of fitness: Gym bro und Pink sexy gym boot camp. These two silhouettes, one male and one female, strike a muscle flexing pose — bodies from the CrossFit world — bigger than life, muscular, strong and sculpted.

Sonja Yakovleva creates her motifs somewhere between documentary and fiction, between her own practice, extensive research in the studio, Instagram fitness feeds and prompted fantasies, which she then condenses into her papercuts. She sifts through digital imagery in the various echo bubbles of online culture and filters out images that she uses as material. Her instinct for iconographic elements and cultural symbols that characterise our times is unmistakable.

Self-optimisation and self-presentation of the body have always been human endeavours. In online culture, beauty filters have shifted beauty ideals by exaggerating individual features in such a way that people adapt their real bodies to their digital image, giving rise to a zeitgeist phenomenon: Snapchat dysmorphia.

In the world of fitness, everyone becomes a sculptor and image producer of their own body and its depiction. In Germany alone, gym memberships are growing by 10% per year. And currently, revenues of more than 5.44 billion euros have been generated for the industry by more than 11 million people.

Sonja Yakovleva’s work celebrates physicality from the very beginning. The contrast between highly contemporary motifs and historical techniques, which she has been perfecting for years, is her recognisable trademark. And she manages to translate images from fast-moving online culture into meticulous, handmade papercuts that are extremely time-consuming and labour-intensive.

In INSTAREXIE Yakovleva is creating her silhouette work as a ceiling installation for the first time. Six pictorial surfaces with a total of 240 tiles make up the monumental motif, with each one individually drawn, rescaled, transferred and cut out. A complex composition of contours and internal cuts. In this new, expansive installation, the central element is the body: the material of the optimised self. The ceiling areas display self-contained worlds of fitness with differentiated community aesthetics — Barry’s Bootcamp, Urban Heroes, Pilates Fused and countless more — boutique gyms that become themed stages. Here, people take to the stage and perform work on their own bodies, always under the watchful eye of others. The large mirrors, transparent glass facades and omnipresent mobile phone cameras not only serve as perfect settings for presenting the body, but they also serve as a means of self-control, comparison, motivation and competition. Everyone wants to showcase their own physical power and gain recognition for it, in a world where appearance is moulded by performance. Tell me which world of fitness you belong to and I’ll tell you who you are.

Yakovleva explicitly emphasises the institution-like character of fitness studios. In this multi-optional society, the human body is quantified, measured and monitored, and the wearable fitness watch is always measuring. The physique is not to be taken for granted, but is the result of willpower, discipline and labour.

The result is a neoliberal field of tension between voluntarism and submission, where performance requirements and conformity to an ideal image are internalised and exert power. The gym becomes a body factory: bodies are optimised, efficiency is increased, flexibility is a guiding principle, and strictness and toughness towards one’s own stamina are virtues. Working against your own limits is the overarching motto.

Sonja Yakovleva’s work reveals that every body bears traces of its social background and that the power relations of society are reflected in it. The frequency of visits to the gym is a status symbol, as is the choice of club. People go there every day, before and after work, especially in well-paid jobs where physical labour is no longer performed — so working out is a must. And statistics from 2017 show that Frankfurt is the city with the highest proportion of active gym-goers, especially in the premium segment.

Yakovleva practises boxing herself at Ibra Boxing in Frankfurt, and for this exhibition, she has tried out new forms of fitness to excess, capturing the essence of her observations in the silhouette paintings. Ass Ass Ass is a dominant element — the female ass as an icon. Brazilian butt lifting has become the most practised procedure worldwide. It epitomises the male gaze and its objectification of the female body and, at the same time, symbolises neoliberal postfeminism — autonomous, free to make decisions and entrepreneurial. Yakovleva’s works are provocative in that her images quote sexist representations, but were created in an attitude of liberated empowerment. The self-optimisation of the body in fitness culture is hard work; working in your free time, following some inner imperative, promises social recognition and participation through the perfect body.

Yakovleva’s monumental visual worlds condense and compress, quote and caricature her observations, as she looks at the new generation of believers celebrating the collective rituals of a fitness cult with humour and irony. She portrays the places where bodywork is practised fanatically and where performance is quantified by coaches, headset commands and precise intervals. Or she focuses on the stretchability of the ideal body in minimalistic Pilates worlds with smoothies and food bowls. Yakovleva’s gaze is unsparing and sensual at the same time; however, she never places herself above her figures, but gets fully involved with them.

Courtesy the artist

In Sonja Yakovleva’s new works, specially created for this exhibition, the overarching motif is the representation of an abstract power that governs bodies and is embedded in them.

In State of Strike, the city itself is a body whose vital functions are maintained by various organs, and the blood in its veins are the workers who supply the living organism. Sonja Yakovleva depicts these people crowded together in the streets as they go on strike, utilising their bodies in public space. But pigs from industrial fattening farms are also freed and become part of the resistance against the exploitation of their bodies.

Yakovleva has created a mural over 10.5 metres long. It depicts a city in which e-commerce, the meat industry, delivery services, day-care centres, hospitals, construction sites, industrial cleaners and restaurants have been condensed into a very small space. She also deliberately incorporates recognisable Frankfurt buildings into her composition — the Alte Oper, the central railway station, the facades of brothels and the Sudfass-Beine. Some of the motifs were photographed by the artist in Frankfurt, and others come from online stock photography providers or Instagram. In the images’ composition, various locations in the post-industrial city, which are otherwise marginalised or made invisible, are placed at the centre.

The city is depicted here as a symbol of the modern age and society at large, with all the buildings representing different production sites. We see a dense flow of bodies going on strike. Yakovleva is driven by the contradictions of an increasingly flexible and yet insecure work environment. People, especially those with migrant backgrounds, are often forced to take on difficult jobs — characterised by poor working conditions. In her depiction, she shows us a city of delivery drivers, temporary workers, cleaners and meat industry employees. What would happen if not only the unionised workers, but they too were to go on strike? Would everything come to a halt? Who are all these people who keep the pulsating system of a city and a state functioning? In her mural, Yakovleva takes a close look at migrant workers and has them populate the city streets with their bodies. The artist also includes animals in the strike, because they too have lost self-determination over their bodies.

Through her thematic focus on the migrant strike of precariously employed workers, Yakovleva succeeds in raising the question of the relationship between body and politics in two different ways. On the one hand, how are workers’ bodies controlled and exploited in today’s precarious labour conditions? And on the other hand, how can these bodies become a new force by going on strike and opposing precisely this control and exploitation? And by going on strike, demands for solidarity and new forms of social organisation are brought to the streets by these protesting bodies.

Yakovleva’s working process is characterised by montage and collage, collecting and assembling. For Germany, 2023 and 2024 have been the years of nationwide waves of strikes. Not only for higher wages, but also for the implementation of climate protection measures. So for State of Strike, a variety of elements have been incorporated into the monumental mural: research into historical sources and literature on migrant strikes in the 1970s and the working conditions of precarious workers since the post-war period, interviews with e-commerce workers, the publication of the investigative collective “correctiv” in early 2024 and the remigration plans of right-wing networks. Through the social mobilisation against racism that soon followed, Yakovleva thought about a migrant strike as a means of protest against racist tendencies in society. During her research, she sifted out scenes and stories, contradictions and patterns from her own world of experience, which she incorporated into the themes of labour and strikes. She visualises the strike of migrants and workers, who represent a large part of the working class, and sets her monumental work of art against the fast-moving flow of information in the media.

For this new mural, Yakovleva quotes the visual language of various forms of propaganda art: the agit prop of the 1920s in Soviet Russia, the murales (wall paintings) of Mexico’s Diego Rivera and even street art. She uses isometric perspective, in which the image has no single vanishing point and in which the edges of components are drawn in abbreviated form. And through the use of collage and condensing visual elements, she depicts different scenes simultaneously , using geometric forms and the symbolism of colours —black, white and red.

This is the first time that Yakovleva has combined her characteristic technique of paper cutting with drawing. In her practice, the drawing is the central starting point for design and image composition, but it is lost in the act of cutting. Her pictures are created as drawings, which the artist rescales with the help of a grid      and transfers to larger paper. In State of Strike, we see her painting skills, her mastery of lines, shapes and shading, her ability to observe and reproduce the world around her, her love of experimentation and her craftsmanship. Sonja’s drawings and papercuts thrive on the flattening of motifs and stage like perspective. Her style can be associated with the phenomenon of superflat, an artistic style that reacts to consumer culture in postmodern painting.

Yakovleva says of her choice of papercutting that she likes the cross-references to historical development. From the 17th century onwards, the papercut became popular in Europe as a time-saving and cost-effective substitute for portrait painting. And whilst painting was reserved for the aristocracy, the lower classes could have silhouettes made from the outline of a profile, which were offered by street artists.

In her work State of Strike, Sonja Yakovleva combines references to an artistic technique with socio-political questions — regarding the possible outcomes of going on strike, through which the invisibility of these precarious and often migrant forms of labour becomes visible. There is a sense of solidarity among the workers who go on strike, which provides strength to build alternative ways of living and working. These bodies, that otherwise work, deliver, pack, transport or wash up, become visible through the movement on the street.They become resistant bodies that withdraw their physical strength from exploitation, and instead, bundle it in the collective in order to protest against their exploitation and bring about change.