in other’s shoes – maybe no need for shoes, 2022
Sculpture
Epoxy putty, motorbike parts, electrical wires, fake flower, Polymer gypsum, steel, plaster
79 x 65 x 110 cm

Interlock Vertebra Devices, 2021
Sculpture
3D print, epoxy putty, wire, computer parts, spray, earring, cables, cable ties, motorbike part, PET sheet, hardware, tube
45 x 68 x 160 cm

Courtesy the artist

Yein Lee challenges the notion of the body as flawless, intact and always functional. Her sculptures take the form of anthropomorphic, life-sized figures that, stripped of their outer shells, reveal their inner structures. Lee constructs her works from electrical cables, steel pipes, computer parts, but also from branches, twigs and found everyday objects. Her material is at once synthetic and natural. It comes from industrial production, from the remnants of our digitally networked society and from nature.

Lee’s sculptures embody the contradictions of their origins—between handcraft and short-lived disposable objects, destined for material decay. Rather than resolving these oppositions, Lee makes them visible. Her works exist in an in-between state—oscillating between human and machine, the living and inert matter, organic growth and decay.

Born and raised in South Korea, Yein Lee has lived and worked in Vienna for several years. Her work draws on influences from classical sculpture, science fiction and cyberculture. She is fascinated by Medardo Rosso’s fragile wax figures and by the Baroque sculptures of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who created the illusion of living bodies in marble. Lee is also drawn to figures from myth and literature that embody the idea of transformation as hybrid beings: Daphne’s metamorphosis, in Greek mythology, as she escapes Apollo’s assault by turning her female body into a tree; or the boy Namu Doryeong from the Korean founding myth, son of a celestial fairy and an earthly tree, who survives the great flood and from whom humankind descends.

Yein Lee explores the similarities of internal structures across organisms: from the network of human blood vessels, nerves, muscles and tendons to the branches and roots of plants. Her figures are made of permeable fibres that merge and break apart, grow in rhizome-like patterns and send out extensions in search of support in space. Lee conceives of the body not as a closed form. From these clusters she gives her figures multiple faces, cast from herself and from people close to her.

They reflect a world in which the boundaries between human and machine, nature and technology, self and other are increasingly dissolving. In this in-between realm, the body no longer appears as a stable centre but as an unstable interface, in a state of constant transformation.

At the centre of her reflections lies the impossibility of conceiving the body as a static entity. The body is transformation, extension and reconstruction, and at the same time, it is fragile. Yein Lee shares this experience from her own medical history: implants were anchored in her body, which healed and now support her. Her body has grown together with the metal of the screws—like a tree whose bark encloses an object that stood in its way. The body as an amalgam of the organic and the artificial, as a new normality—that is life.

Yein Lee’s work is permeated by the ideas of cyberpunk aesthetics: bodies appear extended, damaged, fragmented, shot through with cables and apparatuses. Lee presents fragile, precarious existences that linger in an in-between state. Transformation, metamorphosis and openness are not transitions but conditions, in which her sculptural beings continually reassemble themselves anew.

In the work Interlock Vertebra Devices, speculative implants for body enhancement appear packaged in plastic like fast-moving consumer goods. The desire for improvement, youth and functionality comes to the fore: the human being as driven by the pursuit of a better physical self.

Her works are pleas for a new corporeality: vulnerable, processual and beyond normative attributions. At a time when optimisation has become a trend, and technology a prosthesis and an extension of the body, Lee’s sculptures open up a field of possibilities: for other bodies, other futures, other forms of being.

Yein Lee (*1988 Incheon, KOR) is a South Korean artist currently living in Vienna (AT) who works in the fields of installation, sculpture, painting and performance. After completing her bachelor’s degree in traditional Asian painting at Hongik University in Seoul (KOR), Lee earned a master’s degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (AT). Her work has been shown internationally in group exhibitions at the 15th Gwangju Biennale (KOR), the Centre d’Art La Meute in Lausanne (CH), the Château – Centre d’Art Contemporain de la Ville d’Aubenas (FR), the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris (FR), Belvedere 21 in Vienna (AT), Kunstraum Niederösterreich in Vienna (AT). 2025 the Galerie Bremond Capela in Paris (FR) dedicated Lee a solo show.

VINE 2.0, 2022
Arm prosthesis
Resin, electronics, metal components and gold plated metal
70 x 14 x 14 cm

Photo and video installation with photos by Rosie Williams, Ewelina Stechnij, Louie Banks, Lukasz Suchorab, Omkaar Kotedia, Rosemary Williams, Simon Clemenger, Andrew Perris

Courtesy The Alternative Limb Project

Sophie de Oliveira Barata is a designer, artist and prosthetist. She works with people who, through artistic and artificial enhancement, create and wear a self-empowering form of their body. The word ‘prosthesis’ derives from the Greek ‘to add’. In the medical sense it refers to an artificial body part that replaces a missing limb. Yet in the context of The Alternative Limb Project, addition means more. It isn’t simply about supplementing the body or replacing a lost limb. Her ‘alternative limbs’ are an empowerment of personality. They are an expression of a body that, through our own narratives, assumes a self-selected, extended form.

The absence of a limb—whether from birth, through accident or due to medical necessity—has long been associated with social stigmatisation. The idea of a body that doesn’t conform to the norm is often a factor in the exclusion and shame experienced by those affected. Prostheses can partly compensate for the body’s missing functions, and with advancing technology, this can now be done in such a way that the distinction between the body and the artificial part is largely unobtrusive and invisible.

Sophie de Oliveira Barata, however, represents a practice that not only provides wearers with a functional prosthesis, but develops with them a concept of proud otherness. It is about the empowerment of their being and the wearing of an ornament that extends their bodies and embodies the uniqueness of the wearer. For this reason, de Oliveira Barata, deliberately, doesn’t call her objects prostheses, instead, provocatively, she calls them ‘alternative limbs’ where the ‘alternative’ stands for expansion and inimitability.

De Oliveira Barata’s work brings together science, technology, medicine and art. Behind each of her projects and objects stands an individual person, with their own story and psychology. Today, de Oliveira Barata collaborates with a wide range of trades and specialists, including electronics engineers, mechanical engineers, prosthetic technicians, traditional craftspeople (such as woodcarvers), metalworkers and jewellery designers. In addition to extensive handcraft, she also employs techniques such as 3D printing and computer-assisted milling.

After studying art, de Oliveira Barata began her career in film, in special effects. She then moved into the medical field, where she spent eight years working in a rehabilitation centre with people who had undergone amputations. Following this, she decided to move beyond simply producing hyperrealistic replicas and instead work with those affected to develop prostheses as forms of artistic and personal expression. Where initially the aim had been realism—to give prostheses an appearance as close to natural limbs as possible and to achieve visual continuity with the body—she broadened her ambition by creating artefacts that tell the story of the individual. Bodies change in their vitality and variability: skin tone shifts with circulation or exposure to the sun and body shape alters with the time of day, weight fluctuation or ageing. And the static nature of the prosthesis remains in contrast to this.

The creation of hyperrealistic limbs begins with a foam mould that replicates the missing body part. A silicone cast is then produced, tailored precisely to the body. Skin surfaces are built up from silicone, tinted with pigments and applied in many layers until the natural skin tone is achieved. To reproduce the translucency of real skin, the material is stretched and threaded with fine fibres. The details then follow—moles, scars, freckles, wrinkles or tattoos—and all can be added individually. Nails, too, are adjusted in shape, colour and length, with nail polish available on request. Clients are involved throughout the entire process and decide which details matter most to them. The result is a piece so lifelike that it blends seamlessly into the wearer’s life.

When the aim is not deception but expression, de Oliveira Barata works with greater freedom. The prosthesis becomes a sculpture, an accessory or a work of art. Here, too, everything begins with dialogue: what does the wearer wish to reveal, what story should the object tell? The team brings together a wide range of handcraft techniques to create a unique piece.

De Oliveira Barata recognised early on that people longed for more than the mere replacement of a missing limb and its function. What they sought was healing. She set out in search of individuals who would join her in developing a new approach to artificial limbs. The first was Viktoria Modesta, a British singer and model, and soon others followed—Paralympic athletes, musicians, artists, former soldiers—all realising their dream of a functional extension to their bodies. They wear their ‘alternative limbs’ with pride; they stand as expressions of their personality and identity.

What is different—and in a majority society may still be regarded as abnormal—is here transformed into adornment, into an affirmative gesture not of concealment but of celebration. Playful, bold, humorous and beautiful, rather than a posture of victimhood that invites pity. This completely alters relationships and self-image.

De Oliveira Barata’s prostheses don’t hide physical differences, they reveal them. They transform them into something special and endow them with their own power. “I like making these pieces”, she emphasises, “because the conversations change, from pity to wonder.” The ‘alternative limbs’ open up a dialogue about the idea of the human body and differences in body images, and they celebrate them.

“When people wear their alternative prostheses, their posture often changes”, says Sophie de Oliveira Barata. “That is because they have been involved in the process of creation—and because the pieces attract attention. Instead of pity, they encounter curiosity, sometimes even admiration. That gives them strength. Some wear their prostheses on special occasions, slipping into a kind of alter ego. Others make them a permanent part of their identity.”

The exhibition Anatomy of Fragility at the Frankfurter Kunstverein presents two works from the series of The Alternative Limb Project. One was created as a functional prosthesis, the other as an object in which aesthetic concerns take precedence.

Materialise is an alternative arm created for activist and model Kelly Knox. It’s divided lengthwise into two halves, one side consists of silicone skin, the other of a multitude of materials: steel, stone, earth, wood, moss, oil, cork, wool, bronze, rhodium and gold. Depending on her mood and state of mind, the wearer can interchange the elements. This alters not only the texture but also the weight of the arm. Kelly Knox decides for herself how she wishes to wear it.

The arm was produced using 3D-printing and CNC-milling techniques, alongside extensive handcraft and artisanal work. The skin side is a realistic reproduction of the wearer’s right arm in a silicone-like material, representing Kelly Knox’s physical self. The choice of materials embodies the individual, emotional and spiritual dimensions of her personality.

Another model, VINE 2.0, was also created for Kelly Knox. This ‘alternative limb’ distances itself even more decisively from the idea and aesthetics of realistic-looking limbs. The arm becomes a tentacle-like structure made up of 26 vertebral segments. The wearer controls the arm’s movements using pressure sensors in the shoe and artificial tendons contract or loosen, producing fluid motions. Through an electromagnet, the prosthesis connects to a metal fixture on the body via a clip-on system. Circuits, batteries and sensors now transmit the organism’s impulses via Bluetooth to the alternative body part.

VINE 2.0 seems to pay tribute to the thinker Donna Haraway. Under the concept of ‘tentacular thinking’, she questions a world view in which humans, with their specific corporeality and needs, elevate themselves to the centre of creation. Haraway advocates overcoming the typically Western mode of thinking in dualisms: human–animal, nature–technology and body–mind. The future of identity and the body arises beyond these. In A Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway chooses the figure of a hybrid being—part biological organism, part machine—as a metaphor for emancipatory purposes and for overcoming patriarchal structures.

For Anatomy of Fragility, the Frankfurter Kunstverein has assembled a comprehensive selection of documentary films, photographs and technical drawings in collaboration with Sophie de Oliveira Barata. As the numerous objects belong to their wearers, it is they who bear witness to this unique body of work.

The Alternative Limb Project was founded by Sophie de Oliveira Barata (*1982 in London, UK). Her works have been exhibited internationally in institutions such as the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh (UK); the Musée de l’Homme in Paris (FR); Ars Electronica in Linz (AUT); the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago (USA); the Science Museum in London (UK); Museum Arnhem (NL) and Museum Ulm (DE). Sophie de Oliveira Barata gives regularly lectures internationally, most recently at TED X in London (UK); TED MED in San Francisco (USA); and the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds (UK).

It’ll make you feel better, 2022
Öl auf Platte Oil on board
40 x 30 cm

It was coming to an end, 2021
Öl auf Platte Oil on board
30 x 40 cm

Hidden within the folds of the fabric, the quiet hum of memories lingers, 2022
Öl auf Leinwand Oil on canvas
20 x 30 cm

tongue-tied, 2025
Öl auf Leinwand Oil on canvas
80 x 60 cm

These strings I’m in, 2024
Öl auf Leinwand Oil on canvas
60 x 50 cm

Ohne Titel Untitled, 2023
Sechs Zeichnungen auf Papier Six drawings on paper
29 x 42 cm

Never coming home, 2021
Öl auf Leinwand Oil on canvas
40 x 40 cm

Protocol, 2024
Öl auf Leinwand Oil on canvas
80 x 60 cm

Ohne Titel Untitled, 2023
Fünf Zeichnungen auf Papier Five drawings on paper
29 x 42 cm

I am not alone. You are always with me. I don’t know what’s worse, 2022
Oil on board
40 x 30 cm

It’s still happening, 2025
Oil on canvas
100 x 80 cm

Your heart is an empty room, 2021
Oil on board
40 x 30 cm

I want to be normal, 2021
Oil on board
30 x 21 cm

Nobody knows, 2021
Oil on board
25 x 30 cm

I want to be a baby again, 2023
Oil on board
45 x 30 cm

The visitant, 2024
Oil on canvas
50 x 40 cm

Twisted play, 2025
Oil on canvas
80 x 60 cm

Courtesy the artist

Franziska Krumbachner (b. 2002, Altötting, Germany) is currently studying at Offenbach University of Art and Design. She is a painter and drawer. In her oil paintings, she seeks to understand, process, and capture lived experiences in visual form.

Even as a young girl, Franziska Krumbachner drew constantly—as a kind of intimate diary and as a retreat into an inner world. She developed her skills as an autodidact and has continued to refine them over the years. Her motifs arise from dreams and memories that resurface like flashbacks of repressed experiences. Flickering emotions crystallise into images: rooms, narrow corridors, close-ups of body parts, and dysmorphic faces in black and white, folded hands. She always paints from the perspective of a cinematic point-of-view shot—that is, from the narrator’s gaze. As a result, her works carry a distinctly filmic quality.

Krumbachner has recently begun working with digital sketches developed on a tablet. She then freely recreates these compositions onto canvas. The resulting collages merge imagery from internal landscapes with found material sourced from the internet. As Krumbachner works exclusively with oil paints, which she applies to her canvases undiluted, she succeeds in creating highly transparent, delicate layers in which image planes blend into one another, evoking the photographic technique of double exposure.

We would like to let Franziska Krumbachner speak for herself. She describes her work in the following words: “I am an oil painter, and my art is much more than just a form of expression—it is my language, my anchor. My life has been shaped by trauma and mental illness, and painting is not just a passion for me, but a necessity. It helps me make the unspeakable visible and navigate a world that often feels overwhelming. I am deeply grateful to have found this path—a form of communication that goes beyond words and expresses what lives deep within me.”

Franziska Krumbachner (b. 2002, Altötting, DE) has been studying at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach (DE) since 2022. She was admitted based on her outstanding artistic achievements. She focuses on experimental spatial concepts with Prof Heiner Blum and painting with Prof Gunter Reski.

In 2024, she won the Rundgangpreis of the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach am Main, awarded by Künstlerhilfe Frankfurt e. V., and received a Deutschlandstipendium.

Since 2020, Krumbachner has presented her works in various exhibitions, including at the Stadtgalerie Altötting (DE), in Burghausen (DE), at the Stadtgalerie in Bad Soden am Taunus (DE), and at Schloss Fasanerie in Fulda (DE).

Ohne Titel (swarm), 2025
Watercolour on hardboard, wood, acrylic
200 x 120 cm

Ohne Titel (man and bird), 2025
Pencil on paper, glass, wood
22,5 x 15,5 cm

Courtesy the artist

Oscar Kargruber (b. 1999, Sulzrain, Germany) is currently studying sculpture at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. His practice spans drawing, painting, and sculpture. His visual worlds seek to capture a specific atmosphere, one that makes moments of the uncanny and the ambiguous perceptible through essential forms.

For And This is Us 2025, he has created a wooden sculpture staged with elements of abstract painting and drawing. The sculpture depicts a human figure, upright and striding forwards, emerging from a thicket, grasping plants in its hands. Its gaze seeks ours. The expression is ambiguous, enigmatic, the mouth slightly open. The sculpture seems to capture a frozen moment in time—a gesture halted in motion and held in wood. Yet in its unresolved tension, it resists definitive interpretation.

Kargruber describes his subjects as intuitive moments that emerge through drawing and from personal memories. In their symbolism and formal qualities, they reference works from art history, literature, and film. In his sculptures, he searches for a primal quality in form—for the strange, the manic, the authentic, and the passionate.

Karl Blossfeldt’s early modernist close-up photographs of plants serve as a visual source for Kargruber’s carved thicket. He is fascinated by the diversity and formal rigour of Blossfeldt’s magnifications, which produce a totemic and almost threatening kind of beauty. Kargruber translates these into aesthetic elements within his sculpture.

In his practice, Kargruber approaches, almost methodically, the depiction of atmospheric tipping points—moments when beauty threatens to turn into something uncanny, where the lines between good and evil, beauty and danger begin to blur. He seeks this sense of ambiguity. Is the figure under threat, reaching for the plants for support? Or is it itself a threat, hiding in the undergrowth, clutching the foliage with force?

His training as a master wood sculptor enables him to apply his virtuosic skill in carving delicate, intricate forms from solid blocks of wood. The wooden figure is spatially expanded by two wall pieces: an abstract painting made up of dotted colour points describing a spiral movement, and a small pencil drawing showing a figure in profile holding a seed between their lips, which a bird grasps with its beak. Kargruber sees these images as energy made material—gestural traces that make the field of force surrounding his figures perceptible.

Oscar Kargruber draws inspiration from sculptural traditions of both antiquity and modernity. The power of frontal representation found in Greek  and Egyptian sculpture, as well as in Etruscan art, resonates within his visual language. He is drawn to reduced forms that allow only the essential to remain. In his work, Kargruber is not interested in naturalistic depiction. His treatment of volume and anatomy is stylised rather than idealised. The silhouette of the body, in its linearity, is universal. It rejects gendered attributes and individual characteristics—yet the gaze remains central and is rendered with great expressiveness. With his timeless and raw aesthetic, Kargruber stands as a representative of a contemporary approach that consciously distances itself from dominant modes of current artistic expression.

Oscar Kargruber (b. 1999, Sulzrain, DE) has been studying sculpture at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main (DE) under Prof. Tobias Rehberger since 2022. Prior to that, he studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe (DE) from 2021 to 2022. Between 2016 and 2021, Kargruber completed an apprenticeship as a master wood sculptor at the Städtische Berufs- und Meisterschule für das Holzbildhauerhandwerk in Munich (DE). In his work, he focuses primarily on traditional artistic techniques such as sculpture, painting and drawing. While his motifs are usually created in intuitive moments, their symbolism and formality consciously build up references to art history, literature and film.

Kargruber has presented his work at the following institutions: Piktogram, Warsaw (PL), Galleria Fuocherello, Turin (IT), Halfsister, Berlin (DE), Delphispace, Freiburg (DE), Kornhäuschen, Aschaffenburg (DE), Art Basel in Paris (FR). Since 2024, he has been a scholarship holder of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes.

The Rivers and Streams of a Dissolved Mind, 2024
Brass and original substance from a dead animal
100 x 126 cm
Courtesy Toni R. Toivonen and Galerie Forsblom

The Perfect Moment, 2022
Brass and original substance from a dead animal
400 x 200 cm
Courtesy Nelimarkka Foundation

Mother, 2022
Brass and original substance from a dead animal
300 x 200 cm
Courtesy Private Collection, Finland

Metascape (3), 2022
Brass and original substance from a dead animal
32 x 38,5
Courtesy Private Collection, Finland

Crucifixion, 2018
Brass and original substance from a dead animal
300 x 400 cm
Courtesy Sara Hildén Art Museum

21 Strangers (In My Head), 2024
Brass and original substance from a dead animal
48 x 61 cm
Courtesy Toni R. Toivonen and Galerie Forsblom

The Agony And The Ecstasy, 2024
Brass and original substance from a dead animal
500 x 200 cm
Co-produced by Frankfurter Kunstverein
Courtesy Toni R. Toivonen and Galerie Forsblom

Toni R. Toivonen: Miten kuolema kunnioittaa elämää? (Toni R. Toivonen: How Death Honors Life), 2023
Film, 17 min
Directed by Meeri Koutaniemi
Season 2, Episode 5 of the TV series Irti Kuvasta with Meeri Koutaniemi
Produced by Gimmeyawallet Productions, Executive Producer: Elise Pietarila
Courtesy Gimmeyawallet Productions

Toni R. Toivonen is a seeker. He creates images that pose the overarching question of what life is and what remains when it fades away. He creates images that reveal the unspeakable, for which there is neither image nor word, in order to capture the moment of transition between being and non-being and to outlast transience through the sacrality of the image.

For his central motif, Toni R. Toivonen has chosen the animal, either alone or in groups. Since the origins of mankind, animals have been magically charged beings, guardians and mediators of the connection to the spiritual world. Already in prehistoric times, people painted and carved animal figures on cave walls, turning them into sacred places. The artists were shamans.

Toivonen is a painter, but he does not paint the animals. Toivonen has a deep knowledge of the history of art and painting. He has mastered the language and meanings of colour, form, material and symbolism. But after years of painting, he has abandoned the artistic gesture of depiction by imitation. Allegory and symbols no longer meet his needs in his search for the existential. He allows reality to imprint its own image on the material.

The artist approaches the mystery of life with reverence. He creates the conditions to allow the cycle of life to take place. Everything is transformation. To see transience, not to avert one’s gaze but to find comfort in the natural cycle, is the fragile level on which Toivonen moves. Melancholy and sadness, despite beauty— sacred experience.

Toni R. Toivonen seeks forms of comprehension for this fundamental human experience: transience as the most immeasurable of all absences. His works bear the imprints of the living and allow them to become objects of silent contemplation in sublime beauty. The absent forms of the departed animals are deeply inscribed in the imprint.

Toivonen lives and works far from the city, in the solitude of the Finnish forests. His artworks arise from a deep connection with animals. They are companions and beings for whom he feels respect and love. None of the animals lose their lives for art. Some of them, horses and dogs, died a natural death after spending their lives with Toivonen. Others were brought by foresters or by people whose wish it was to eternalise their animals in memory. The sacredness of the moment of transition—from life to death—is a mystery for the artist, which he endeavours to approach with his paintings.

The artist places the bodies of the dead creatures on brass surfaces. He arranges them carefully. It is the bodies that change the metal. It is the substance that surfaces, of which all living things are made. It corrodes and oxidises the metal. Like an alchemist, Toivonen has studied and tested the mutual reactions of bodies and metal. His art is created during weeks of waiting and observing, in which the cycle of nature takes its course and the cycle of becoming and fading is immortalised in the metal. What emerges are monumental images, figurative or abstract. They are signs of an incarnation, yet they visualise more than mere allusions.

The colour gold plays an essential role in Toivonen’s works. From Ancient Egypt, the cults of the Incas, Byzantine mosaics and Christian painting from the Middle Ages to modern times, the beauty of gold symbolises the transcendent, the supernatural and the eternal. And so Toivonen’s paintings are not created on canvases, but on golden yellow brass plates. Brass has the property of oxidising on contact with bodies; it absorbs all imprints as shapes in its surface.

Image and death and the question of transcendence have belonged together since archaic societies (see Hans Belting, Bild-Anthropologie, 2001). In all cultures and at all times, people have searched for forms and rituals to make it possible to experience a connection between the here and now and the hereafter of a spiritual order through images. Toivonen’s works are imprints and symbolise the endurance of the ephemeral.

“You need shadows to understand the light. In a way, you have to recognise death in order to understand life”, says Toivonen.

Toni R. Toivonen (b. 1987, Helsinki, FI) lives and works in Hämeenkoski, Finland. He completed his Master of Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki (FI) in 2016, following his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Arts Academy of Turku University of Applied Sciences (FI) in 2012. Toivonen has exhibited his work in several solo exhibitions in Finland and internationally, including in Stockholm (SE) and Vienna (AT). His works have also been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including the Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki (FI), the Rovaniemi Art Museum, Rovaniemi (FI), and the Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin (DE). His works are part of major public collections, such as the KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (FI), the Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere (FI), the Museum of Contemporary Art Kraków MOCAK, Kraków (PL), the Nelimarkka Museum, Alajärvi (FI), the Saastamoinen Foundation, Helsinki (FI), and the Wihuri Foundation, Helsinki (FI). Toivonen has received multiple awards for his art, which has been documented in the films HEAVY (Theo Bat Schandorff, 2018) and Irti Kuvasta (Meeri Koutaniemi, YLE, 2023).

The world we live in is the result of billions of years of natural development. The transformation of our planet, which accompanies this evolution, can provide insights yet to be discovered into the way Earth deals with change. Science and art offer very different approaches to exploring nature. However, both come together beautifully in this exhibition, which focuses on glimpses into the absent.

If we want to understand the functional relationships between the living world, the solid Earth and the climate system, or if we aim to reconstruct how our planet has changed over millions of years, scientists must gather information that indirectly provides insight into the past. For example, they use the chemical fingerprint left by a global event in geological formations to give shape to the past, the absent, and make it tangible. The study of our planet’s evolution, from the depths of time to the present, is carried out through precise, extensive and ideally innovative measurements of organisms and natural materials. These store information about a phenomenon, a development or a significant event in the living world that needs to be reconstructed. In order to delve deeply into the planet’s history, scientists must overcome incredibly long timescales. We bring the past into the present; we study the traces of a development. The present, therefore, opens up the possibility of gaining insights into processes and sequences that occurred long ago and would otherwise have remained forever hidden.

To discover the absent, it is necessary to look at a question from an unusual perspective. Innovation, creativity and the courage to take unfamiliar paths are the foundations for groundbreaking scientific discoveries. But they also offer an opportunity to provide solutions to the many challenges of a rapidly changing world—solutions built on authentic knowledge. Here, science becomes part of the democratic process, which it is our collective responsibility to protect. The question of what kind of world we want to live in in the future is a societal one, and science, if we choose to frame it this way, can describe the possibilities for shaping that future and the consequences of our actions. Making the absent visible from the present in order to develop options for the well-being of both humanity and nature—that is our opportunity.

We aim, through the collaboration between the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt and the Frankfurter Kunstverein, to reveal new perspectives and narratives concerning the relationship between humans and nature by combining science and art. Both partners bring their own unique expertise to this collaboration. How is the relationship between humans and nature changing against the backdrop of increasingly urgent global issues? What approaches will allow visitors to reflect on themselves without being overwhelmed by the scale and complexity of the question? For both institutions, this collaboration offers the opportunity to perceive nature and its development from different perspectives through jointly developed content. Transforming the absent into a describable reality—that is the art in science.

The collaboration between the Frankfurter Kunstverein and Senckenberg is always a great pleasure. We hope that visitors will feel and take away this enthusiasm when experiencing the exhibition.

Prof Dr Andreas Mulch,
Director, Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt

Prof Dr Andreas Mulch has been a professor at the Institute of Geosciences at the Goethe University Frankfurt since 2010 and Director of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt since 2015. As a member of the Senckenberg Board of Directors, he is responsible for the research programme of the Senckenberg Society for Nature Research. The latter is one of the world’s leading institutions for natural and biodiversity research, with eight institutes, three museums and around 850 employees operating globally. Andreas Mulch received his PhD from the University of Lausanne in 2004, and his work has taken him to the University of Minnesota, Stanford University and Leibniz University Hannover. His research focuses primarily on climate changes in Earth’s history and the relationships between climate and biodiversity changes, as well as mountain building. Andreas Mulch is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and has held the A. Cox Professorship at Stanford University.

Since the beginning of mankind, Homo sapiens have endeavoured to understand their relationship to the world as a structure of meanings. Where do we come from? How do we relate to the other living beings that inhabit the planet with us? How are we part of an infinite universe? Spiritual beliefs and myths, but also scientific observations and the resulting world views change over time and are an expression of how we humans interpret our relationship to the world.

We are increasingly exploring and penetrating the world. We decipher connections, we organise, quantify and name. We have created ever more complex instruments to do this. We find methods, formulate verifiable theorems and establish causalities between cause and effect. Researchers describe the world as it is, both physically and biologically. They use science to formulate terms and concepts and constantly achieve verifiable results. They decode the world and follow methodical procedures that open up immense possibilities for action. In this way, we make the world available to us. But science does not set itself the task of asking about the meaningfulness of life.

And what does art do? Art leads everything back to us. It asks about the meaning of knowledge for us. Artists are concerned with perception, or rather, with the nature of experience itself. How we perceive, visually, linguistically and aesthetically, but also how the experience of life takes place as an existential experience of “being in the world”. And art can transform our relationship with the world through narratives, through images and sounds, through poetry, into an experience of resonance.

Both science and art have their origins in intuition, imagination and conjecture. While scientists have to create evidence, artists can proceed more freely and make associations and imagination the material of their narratives. The meaning of existence and the experience of transcendence can hardly be found in science. We humans have to find them within ourselves. And we often create symbols to do so.

The Presence of Absence highlights matter as a presence into which life imprints itself. Energy and life are potent yet transient. The interplay between life, energy and matter is a central theme of the exhibition.

The exhibition will spatially juxtapose exhibits that translate the abstract concept of the “presence of absence” into an expanded realm of thought from both artistic and scientific perspectives. Works by significant contemporary artists will engage in dialogue with scientific exhibits from geology and astrophysics, including casts from Pompeii, footprints of prehistoric humans from the Laetoli site in present-day Tanzania and replicas of prehistoric cave paintings.

The curatorial narrative explores the astrophysical phenomenon of black holes. Concepts of expansion, time and the infinite cosmos challenge our understanding. Simultaneously, they provoke questions about our identity and origins. Our planet hovers somewhere between the boundless and the eternal. For a fleeting moment, the window of our lives opens, revealing the unique experience of our existence through our bodies, senses and minds. Each exhibit, in its own distinct way, engages with this existential exploration of being and humanity across the dimensions of space and time.

With this exhibition, we also trace the origins of art as a fundamental human desire to express abstract ideas. Why did Homo sapiens, tens of thousands of years ago, carve animal figures and abstract geometric shapes into the walls of deep caves? Why did they create images of things that were understood by others as symbols, serving as a connection to higher, non-manifest, spiritual realms? Why did Homo sapiens, unlike other species, develop a need for transcendence?

One of the countless stories and myths that moved us is recorded by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, written around 77 years AD, shortly before he met his death in the fiery ash rain of Pompeii: the myth of Butades of Sicyon, the Corinthian potter, and his daughter. The story goes like this: the young girl loved a young man who had to leave for a long journey. As the separation approached, the girl drew the outline of her lover’s head against the wall where the light of the fire fell. The father, moved by her plight, filled in this shadow image with colour and made a clay imprint of the outline, which he then fired. According to Pliny’s myth, art arises from the desire to capture the transient and fleeting; to preserve it out of wistfulness and longing, absence and memory, but also out of love and through beauty. This parable is touching because it embodies such fundamental feelings.

The outline, the stone wall and the fire—doesn’t this remind you of the earliest cave paintings and engravings found by palaeoanthropologists and archaeologists on every continent? Were these the origin of art at the dawn of humanity?

The oldest evidence is attributed to the Blombos Cave in South Africa, dating back 140,000 years. With the migrations of Homo sapiens, cave art spread across every continent. Despite such incredibly extended time periods, this early art exhibits similar techniques and motifs. These seem to have been passed down from group to group, from generation to generation, long before the physiological evolution of the larynx and brain suggested the emergence of language and writing.

For tens of thousands of years, humans—early artists—created images of animals, human figures and abstract signs. Did they grapple with the same questions and ideas that modern humans do?

The cave paintings of the San people in South Africa and Botswana, or those from the Magdalenian culture of the Stone Age in Europe, served as a readable visual language for early humans. They depicted the experienced environment while also representing the spiritual cosmos of these ancient people. The stone walls, where humans created their paintings, far from the outside world and deep in the darkness of the earth, were more than just canvases. They were like a skin that separated this world from the other. Negative forms and imprints of human hands have been found in caves on every continent. These suggest the magic of contact, the touch of a hand on the surface of the rock as a gateway to another world. Leaving a handprint may have been part of a sacred act of connection with an invisible beyond—a transcendental experience. It is evidence of the primordial human need and eternal quest for a deeper relationship with a reality beyond the individual.

Awe in the face of nature. The feeling that there is more than we know. The striving to understand, to perceive through both our senses and our minds the eternal structures that reveal the order of everything in this universe and ourselves as part of it.

Since the dawn of humanity, people have gazed at the night sky. “Mathematics is the language in which the book of the universe is written”, said Galileo Galilei. It is a way of assigning meaning to symbols that can then be read and understood by others. Mathematics is a universal language of human thought, and mathematical rules reflect the order found in all natural processes, whether it’s the Fibonacci sequence or Einstein’s equations. This makes mathematics the purest form of expressing universal principles. Music follows precise mathematical structures, the growth of plants, the sequence of tides and every form of existence can be described by mathematical equations. Yet, there remains so much that humanity does not yet understand. Time and again, the power of the human mind will strive to push these boundaries.

What is the origin of all matter on earth and in the infinity of the cosmos? What effects do natural events create that reshape the earth and affect people’s lives with their power? And how do people deal with the existential need to face eternity in their finiteness? What myths and images do they create in order to connect with the spiritual? Is art a way of immortalising oneself in time? The exhibition is dedicated to these questions, which have been driving the human imagination from prehistoric times to the present day. Ever since we humans have existed on earth, we have created stories, symbols and signs to give form to our feelings, thoughts and knowledge, to leave traces in time and perhaps to connect with eternity.

We experience the miracle of reality through the senses of our body. This consists of the elements of exploding stars in space: the nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood and the carbon in our cells. In fleeting moments, we connect with eternity and give traces of existence a material form. Art is one way of doing this.

I would like to thank Claudio Parmiggiani, Indigo and Mayo Bucher, the sons of Heidi Bucher, Toni R. Toivonen, Petra Noordkamp, the artists of the Marshmallow Laser Feast collective and Lawrence Malstaf, as well as the institutional lenders, Dr Gabriel Zuchtriegel and the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, Prof Dr Fabio Martini and Dr Lapo Baglioni of the Florentine Museum and Institute of Prehistory “Paolo Graziosi”, the Natural History Museum Vienna, the LWL-Museum of Natural History in Münster, Nicolò Stabile, founder of the initiative Il Cretto è casa mia of the survivors of the earthquake in the town of Gibellina, as well as the photographer Giuseppe Ippolito, the VR creator Alberto Stabile and the writer Giovanna Giordano. I would like to thank the Italian Consulate General for its patronage. I would especially like to thank Prof Dr Andreas Mulch, Director of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt, and Prof Dr Luciano Rezzolla from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Goethe University Frankfurt for a time of joint thinking and working.

Franziska Nori
Director Frankfurter Kunstverein

MYRIAD. Installation, 2023
Fourteen modules, five seating blocks, two seating benches made of wood, Resysta, Ytong, coated with coloured concrete
Various sizes

Interactive projection mapping on three carbon modules, floor projection, reactive multi-channel audio installation

MYRIAD. Virtual Reality Experience, 2023
Virtual Reality Application
Each story 10 min
Presentation module, one seating block made of wood, coated with coloured concrete
Various sizes

360° 3D Documentation, 2021
Stationary Virtual-Reality Station with two videos
10:09 min
Presentation module, one seating block made of wood, coated with coloured concrete
Various sizes

Courtesy MYRIAD. Where we connect., Interactive Media Foundation and Filmtank, in co-creation with Miiqo Studios, Context Film and Artificial Rome

Every year, a myriad of living beings traverses our planet. Their migrations, orchestrated in regular rhythms, choreograph the life of our planet like that of a pulsating superorganism. The decisions animals make on their journeys, the ways they interact with the ever-changing environment, and the consequences of their migrations on ecosystems are all reshaping our understanding of the interdependency of all living creatures and the shared spaces they inhabit. The natural sciences explore these connections, which also resonate interpretatively in the social sciences and philosophy. Ancient stories and myths in different cultures have long told of the completeness that binds all living beings.

MYRIAD. Where we connect. is an immersive, multimedia installation at the intersection of art, science and storytelling. This walk-through, interactive project celebrates its premiere in the exhibition Bending the Curve – Knowing, Acting, Caring for Biodiversity, alongside the previously successful VR experience and a 360° 3D documentary. The work allows us to adopt the perspective of individual animals, taking us along on their long journeys across the continents of earth.

In the internationally acclaimed Virtual Reality experience MYRIAD. Where we connect., visitors follow the migrations of a green sea turtle, a female Arctic fox, and a group of northern bald ibises. Each journey combines scientific knowledge with moving images and visual information about the animals’ routes through a world increasingly influenced by human activity.

The 360° 3D film, which is also award-winning, shows the flight of the northern bald ibises over the Alps and their successful reintegration into their natural habitat. The spectacular footage was made with the help of an ultralight aircraft.

A central element of MYRIAD. Where we connect. is carbon. Over eons of the cosmos, this fundamental element arose in the hearts of stars through the fusion of helium. It arrived on our planet from space through countless asteroid impacts, becoming the chemical building block of life. The bodies of all living beings, including plants, fungi, animals and humans, contain this element. Carbon has thus become one of the central design elements of the multimedia art installation. The visual worlds of MYRIAD. Where we connect. are based on black and white charcoal drawings, from which digital animations were created. The forms of carbon’s binding structures live on in the sculptural spatial elements and their tactile, haptic surfaces. All 3D animations and elements of the multimedia installation are monochromatic. They insert fragments of knowledge and give visual artistic expression to data that has been interpreted.

The journeys of individual animals during their migrations are narrated on three large-scale carbon objects. In the overall 22-minute animation, visitors follow the flight routes of animal flocks and the stories of individual species. Amur falcons, monarch butterflies, and common cranes are featured. As one of the elements of animal migrations, air marks the beginning of the exhibition at the Frankfurter Kunstverein. Borders, obstacles, land use, as well as changes in the Earth’s system and polar melting, pose significant challenges to living beings during their migrations.

Made of wood, the installation objects are coated with black-pigmented concrete putty. These materials were sonically deconstructed, captured, and used for the soundscape by means of the audio effect “Convolution Reverb”. The sound characteristics and audio processing of the materials shape the atmosphere, generating novel sounds of material quality.

The sculptural elements of the spatial installation are embedded in a 360-degree soundscape. The acoustic spatial experience follows the concept of Soundscape Ecology. It orchestrates biological sounds (biophony), human sounds (anthropophony), and non-biological but sound-producing natural phenomena. The acoustic ecosystem thereby created responds to the presence of visitors in the space, symbolizing the changing influence of humans on their environment.

MYRIAD. Where we connect. was created in close collaboration with an interdisciplinary team. The representations are based on real data from over 20,000 tracked animals migrating in water, on land, and in the air. The data comes from the Movebank database, a long-term project of the Department of Animal Migration at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. MYRIAD. Where we connect. brings together current research content from the fields of animal migration, behavioral biology, climate research and infrastructure development, drawing on the Big Data of the Movebank project, among other sources. Abstracted data and information are transformed into experiences through art, creating a connection between people’s imagination and awareness of the global interconnectivity of our planet’s ecosystems.

MYRIAD. Where we connect. is a project of the Interactive Media Foundation and Filmtank in co-creation with Miiqo Studios, Context Film and Artificial Rome. Artistic Direction: Lena Thiele, Sebastian Baurmann and Dirk Hoffmann. The sound design was developed by kling klang klong, the exhibition architecture was designed by unit-berlin.

Interactive Media Foundation gGmbH
The Interactive Media Foundation is a nonprofit organization with a philanthropic mission dedicated to developing socially relevant stories through audiovisual media formats (film, virtual reality, exhibitions). It produces and finances its projects with the help of private foundations and public funds, and carries out distribution in collaboration with various partners. Its work is based on a collaborative creative process and a broad network of partners. The Interactive Media Foundation brings together specialists from various societal areas and combines expertise, insights and techniques from different disciplines to open new, often surprising perspectives on captivating and touching topics. Its productions are showcased at media art and film festivals worldwide and in numerous cultural institutions. Recognition from experts and juries from various fields is reflected in prestigious awards such as the Federal Prize for Cultural Education, the Grand Prix of the Art Directors Club, or inclusion in the Forbes list for outstanding creativity. The Interactive Media Foundation was founded in Berlin in 2013.

Filmtank GmbH
Filmtank is a multiple award-winning production company based in Hamburg, Berlin and Stuttgart. Originally from the documentary film sector, its creators now produce entire thematic universes. Filmtank brings together old masters and young inventors to create new perspectives.

Miiqo Studios UG
Miiqo Studios was founded in Berlin in 2012 and focuses on creating immersive worlds at the intersection of art, science and storytelling. They follow a holistic approach, combining contemporary digital technologies and socially relevant stories to create emotional and touching experiences.

Context Film GmbH
Context Film has stood for sophisticated documentaries, innovative fictional storytelling and high-quality informational films since 2004, exploring diverse and complex realities of life. Their work, freely told and independent in form, breaks traditional thought patterns.

Artificial Rome GmbH
Artificial Rome is a studio for digital design and visual communication with a focus on immersive, interactive experiences. The team has been developing interactive communication formats since 2014 through the fusion of digital technology, creative vision and a clear design signature.

kling klang klong GmbH & Co. KG
The Berlin-based creative studio kling klang klong composes sounds and codes for auditory experiences. The team of composers, sound designers, creative thinkers, scientists and technicians explores new ways to touch people through sound. Their works are present in physical and virtual environments, exhibitions, museums and events internationally.

24:04 min

Courtesy the artists and Apalazzo Gallery

The Frankfurter Kunstverein is premiering Eva & Franco Mattes’ new video work, Up Next. This piece takes as its subject the fate of Fatemeh Khishvand (*2001, Tehran, Iran), who became known as Sahar Tabar on Instagram. Her story turned into a phenomenon of internet culture. The case of Fatemeh Khishvand touches on many themes that Eva & Franco Mattes explore in their work: visibility, misinformation, the dissemination of images, meme culture, virality, exploitation and manipulation.

Since 2019, the artist duo has been following the case of the Iranian social media celebrity and archiving thousands of related photos and articles. For the video slideshow, which is conceived entirely without sound, the artists have selected a hundred images: Tabar’s selfie photos alternate with unverified quotes from articles about the blogger, primarily clickbait articles that have spread mostly derogatory, contradictory, and at times false information about the Instagrammer.

In between the individual images, the artist duo inserts black frames, empty pauses. These are meant to give viewers time to reflect on the veracity of what they have seen. This stylistic device breaks with the speed of the mode on Instagram that sets the time limit for Stories and Reels. These may not exceed a maximum duration of 15 and 90 seconds respectively and are continuously played back without interruption. This is all part of a strategy inherent to social media. It was designed to generate neural reactions resembling addiction, triggered by the constant flow of new visual stimuli. This phenomenon is part of the so-called attention economy prevailing in the social media world and has permanently changed our viewing habits.

During peak periods, up to 486,000 people followed Tabar’s Instagram profile. She posted selfies showing herself with exaggerated lips, a pointed, snub nose, pale skin, brightly coloured hair, dark circles around her eyes and bony arms and legs. The resulting aesthetic drew similarities to costumes, zombies, or animated characters, such as Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (2005).

Although the blogger mainly simulated this aesthetic by means of makeup, Photoshop, and filters, she was accused of using lip fillers, liposuction and rhinoplasty by the clickbait press and internet public. This led to a wave of outrage and scandalisation. These speculations were backed up by the citing of dubious sources.

Tabar’s profile garnered significant attention, especially when online gossip sites pointed out her resemblance to actress Angelina Jolie, dubbing her ‘Zombie Angelina Jolie’. They even claimed that she underwent up to 50 medical procedures to resemble the actress. This was just one of the many confusing statements that online tabloids posted, which then went viral.

Many of the media outlets reporting on the case never questioned whether it could be a parody and so a media hoax. Rather than discussing the plausibility of the case itself, the tabloid public became indignant over the young woman. It was precisely this outrage, surprise and uncritical attitude on the part of the online audience that turned Tabar into a global phenomenon.

What can be symbolically observed in this case is the power of misinterpretation and fake news as fuel for an online economy of excitement and scandalisation. Tabar herself declared her appearances as online selfie performances in the tradition of Cindy Sherman.

The staging of fictional identities is a recurring element in art. Cindy Sherman, for example, assumed the appearance of mostly female characters in her works from the 1970s to the early 2000s by arranging clothing, hairstyles and different visual contexts. On her current Instagram account, Sherman posts self-portraits that take the alterations of reality through modern filters to extremes. Younger artists, too, such as Amalia Ullman, have invented fictional identities on Instagram, confusing and entertaining an online audience in equal measure.

Historically, playing with pseudonyms has a long tradition: artists like Marcel Duchamp, whose alter ego was called Rrose Sélavy, Lynn Hershman Leeson with numerous fictional personalities, as well as Eva & Franco Mattes with the invented artist Darko Maver in 1998. His fictional life and works spread through the media and the art world. Maver’s career reached its media peak in 1999 with his invitation to the 48^th Venice Biennale. Later, the artist duo declared publicly that both Maver’s life and his works were invented.

In their modern and contemporary form, these staged performances have developed into collective online performances in which millions of people participate every day on Instagram, in the form of photos and reels, stories and selfies, make-up tutorials and ‘outfits of the day’.

The media phenomenon surrounding the figure of Tabar led to a dramatic turn of events in real life. On October 22, 2019, the Iranian news agency Tasmin reported that Fatemeh Khishwand had been officially charged and arrested in Tehran on charges of ‘blasphemy, incitement to violence, illegal acquisition of property, violation of the national dress code and encouraging young people to corruption’.

This is not an isolated case. Since 2016, Iranian female influencers have been increasingly arrested for their online activities.

At the time of Khishwand’s arrest, Instagram was still permitted as a social media platform in Iran. Twitter and Facebook were already blocked by the government. However, anonymity and freedom of speech were not guaranteed on Instagram either. Given the current backdrop in Iran and the protests for women’s rights, Tabar’s story has gained in importance in the context of the significance of social media channels. From the Arab Spring onwards, these channels have played a central role in enabling civil disobedience, the networking of protesters and the dissemination of independent news.

Since 2011, social media has provided the opportunity for an open-source investigation that aims to document and denounce human rights violations. In autocratic states, such investigations are observed, restricted or blocked. At the same time, the Iranian government has learned how to use social media to its advantage, transforming it from a tool of information to one of disinformation, control, surveillance, and political manipulation – a means of restricting freedom. Sahar Tabar’s Instagram account was deleted at the time of her arrest. While her online persona remains visible, it is overshadowed and unrecognisable due to numerous fake news and fake profiles superimposed upon it.

Why do Eva & Franco Mattes take on this phenomenon? The two artists repeatedly raise broader questions about the authenticity of images and information, the staging and ambivalence that prevail in the digital sphere. The overarching theme is the manipulation of identity online and the way these fakes feed back into real-life society. Digital and analogue communication today form a single unit, indivisible and interwoven.

The presentation of The Bots is added to by the nine-part work Abuse Standards Violations, which marks the beginning of Eva and Franco Mattes’ research on the subject of content moderation. It takes as its theme the issue of the morality of social media and the tech giants associated with it.

Nine wall plexiglass frames, filled with insulation materials, present corporate guidelines, for example excerpts from the Facebook Community Standards, which are not intended for public viewing but for internal purposes only. The companies that have produced these guidelines are almost all unknown, as they wish to remain anonymous. Most of the time even the moderators themselves do not know who their employer is – one of them told Eva & Franco Mattes: ‘I’m pretty sure I work for Google’. The guidelines against violations of abuse standards set moral boundaries for what the companies consider questionable content on social media, laying down what is defined as racist, hateful, controversial, terroristic, pornographic or violent and thus to be removed. ‘Clean’ or ‘OK to show’ refers to images that are considered proper and therefore can circulate on social media, like ‘Shirtless but wearing pants or shirts (and not more than the top band of their underwear is visible)’; ‘inappropriate’ images may include politics and controversial social issues and so should be filtered. ‘Safe’ content includes fine art and celebrity gossip. Despite set guidelines, there is confusion as to when content should be removed, and who gets to decide what to remove. At this point interpretation made by humans is required, an algorithm-based assessment being insufficient.

The policies of large social media platforms change daily. They adapt to current social and political events. Since most IT companies are based in California, they mostly follow the guidelines of US laws and US ‘morality’, yet strive to be sensitive to local and culturally specific morals. The difficulty lies in exercising content moderation for all cultural contexts in a way that avoids the danger of allowing cultural biases to become political interpretation.