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.

Incertae sedis II (Turn Male to Mate), 2025
Resin, clear resin and iron
162 x 135 x 242 cm

Incertea sedis III (Female Adulthood), 2025
Resin, clear resin and iron
215 x 158 x 76 cm

Multivisceral abdominal resection with BiClamp®️ knife 220, 2025
Silicone
245 x 440 cm

Partial liver resection using BiClamp®️ knife 220, 2025
Silicone
410 x 225 cm

Heart Transplant Surgery: ‘No Room for Anything Less Than Perfection’, 2025
Silicone
205 x 377 cm

is like living in two different planets, 2025
Wax
180 x 230 cm

i have an empty sit next to me, 2025
Wax
170 x 180 cm

my heart is pounding the idea of u coming, 2025
Wax
155 x 185 cm

Produced by Frankfurter Kunstverein

Kindly supported by the Zabludowicz Collection

Courtesy Agnes Questionmark

Agnes Questionmark lives and works in Rome and New York. Her reflections revolve around the questions of how bodies are read when they differ from social norms, and what it means for the individual when their body becomes the object of medical interventions and of biopolitical or legal regulation. Agnes Questionmark points to the power of a purely medical gaze, which fixes subjects, assigns genders and pathologises difference. By appropriating and transforming clinical imagery, her art becomes an act of self-empowerment—beyond binary categories of male and female, healthy and ill, human and non-human, fragile and resilient.

Agnes Questionmark’s art takes shape in performances, sculptures, installations and video works, and the starting point of her practice is her own body. Early experiences led the artist to question social expectations and notions/judgements of body and identity. As a child she was under constant medical observation and pharmaceutical treatment. Her body, as Questionmark states, did not fit into any category or into a societal norm of what a body should be. It did not function as it was expected to. And so the artist, at first within a male-assigned identity, began to explore other forms and categories through which to think and represent her own body. The question of the labelling of health and pathology, between self-perception and external perception, became the vanishing point of her reflections and inquiry.

She asked what reality is, searching for concepts with which it might be represented and described. Theories on photography by Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin provided an essential foundation. Over the years, the artist developed her alter ego. In her performance TRANSGENESIS, in which she embodied an oversized octopus for 8 hours a day over 23 days, she celebrated her own transformation and rebirth as Agnes Questionmark.

Octopuses are a guiding figure in Questionmark’s work. They stand for motherhood, as these intelligent sea creatures die in order to nourish their offspring with their own bodies. And they possess not just a single brain, but neural centres in each of their tentacles, enabling them to experience the world around them simultaneously.

For Questionmark, it is about transformation—about bodies that are not dualistic and socially constructed, but embody an in-between state, thereby empowered to assume a new identity and to transcend the old self. The question mark in her name symbolises this very conviction: that the self is not a fixed state, but a continuous flow of shifting perceptions, thoughts and emotions in dialogue with the world.

For the exhibition Anatomy of Fragility, the artist has created a large-scale installation: three life-sized sculptures and six wall objects. The starting material is imagery of open-heart, liver, and stomach surgery, with the surgeons’ hands reaching deep into the inner body. Questionmark distorts these images both digitally and manually, overlaying them with silicone or pouring wax across them like a thick skin. Pigments fuse with the material to form organic landscapes that evoke the appearance of sliced body tissue, and the tactile presence of silicone and wax recalls flesh and inner bodily spaces. In this way, visceral images emerge that grant an intimate view of the body’s vulnerability. In addition, the room is immersed in a soundscape: muffled heartbeats, the rush of blood, the sound of flowing and pumping, beating against the body’s surface from deep within.

At the centre of the space stand three life-sized sculptures: hybrid beings, somewhere between aliens, mythological water figures and fish. Their blue exterior appears cool, their surface wet, as if they had just emerged from the water or had only just been born. For Agnes Questionmark, water is the primal site of transformation, the place of becoming and passing away—the oceans as the origin of all life, or the amniotic fluid of the womb. Her sculptures and installations embody hybrid figures that resist clear categorisation, oscillating between human and animal. Or like a seahorse, this extraordinary delicate water creature where it is the males who carry their young. What is strange, what is other, what society often regards as monstrous, becomes in Questionmark’s work an image of openness and possibility.

The hybrid creatures of Agnes Questionmark cannot be assigned to any species or territory. Underwater or on land, organic or artificial, born or unborn, they embody states of in-betweenness. In this suspension, they point towards a posthuman idea of existence: a world in which bodies are no longer defined by hierarchy, identity or fixedness, but through entanglement, multiplicity and mutual dependency.

Questionmark’s experiences and sensibilities resonate with Donna Haraway’s philosophical notion of ‘tentacular thinking’, with Rosi Braidotti’s idea of the “nomadic subject” and with posthumanist thought. Posthumanism rejects a fixed concept of the human and broadens the focus beyond the human species, considering animals, technologies and the environment as significant agents that shape the world. At its core lies the question of relationships between humans and the many non-human beings, in ever-new constellations, free from hierarchy.

Questionmark makes use of the aesthetics of surgical interventions and biotechnological procedures. In her works the body is opened, made permeable and transformed. Yet while medicine and technology often serve, for the artist, as instruments of standardisation and control, she employs the very same aesthetic means to render these power structures visible. The gaze upon the body itself becomes a political act: who is permitted to shape it, who is being shaped?

For Questionmark, fragility and pain are the preconditions for transformation. Her hybrid beings unite pain with hope, monstrosity with care, disgust with beauty. She and her figures create images of a future in which humanity does not appear as a rigid norm, but as an open process—shaped by individual desires and longings. Agnes Questionmark invites us to rethink the body—as process, as possibility, as fragility that becomes strength.

Agnes Questionmark (*1995 Rome, IT) is an artist working across performance, sculpture, video and installation. Recent long-durational performances include CHM13hTERT (2023), presented in a public train station at SpazioSERRA, Milan (IT) and TRANSGENESIS (2021), presented by The Orange Garden and Harlesden High Street in London (UK). Her work has been shown at the 60th Venice Biennale (IT); Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva (CH); MAXXI Museum in Rome (IT); 14th Gwangju Biennale (KOR); Malta Biennale, Valletta (MLT); König Galerie in Berlin (DE); Fondazione Mario Merz in Turin (IT). Her first Italian solo show was presented at SPE – Spazio Performatico ed Espositivo Dello Scompiglio in Lucca (IT) 2025. Additionally, her writing has been published with NERO Magazine and presented at the ICA Foundation in Milan (IT). 2025 she participates in the 18th Quadriennale di Roma (IT).

Fresh-keeping containers, cream jars, cable pass-throughs, and screw caps (injection molding), yogurt cups and trays (thermoforming), drink and shampoo bottles (blow molding), films (flat and blown films) made from Polybutylene Succinate
Dimensions variable

Courtesy Fraunhofer-Institut für Angewandte Polymerforschung IAP

Plastics are used in all fields of application due to their material properties, from packaging in our everyday lives to high-performance components in aerospace. They have low material density and are cost-effective to manufacture. They require less energy input compared to other materials.

In 2021 alone, the production of plastics amounted to 391 million tons, and the trend is still increasing. About 90% of the produced quantity consists of commodity plastics such as polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), or polystyrene (PS). These thermoplastic polymers represent a significant share of end products in the chemical industry and are almost exclusively made from fossil resources.

Only about 1.5% of plastics produced in 2021 are based on renewable resources. To successfully transform from an economy based on fossil resources to a sustainable circular economy, the share of renewable resources in global plastic production must increase significantly.

A problem as yet unresolved is the amount of plastic in the environment, in rivers, seas and soils. Plastic is intentionally discarded when waste collection systems are lacking, but unintentionally, too. Large quantities also enter the environment through abrasion and wear processes. Plastic particles can be found in all sizes, down to the micro- and nanometer range. The impact on flora and fauna, including the human body, is significant.

Bioplastics are currently produced to add to, and partly replace, commodity plastics. One example of a bioplastic is Polybutylene Succinate (PBS). PBS is particularly promising because it has similar mechanical, optical, and tactile properties to oil-based commodity plastics such as PE and PP. PBS is synthesized from two monomers: succinic acid and butanediol. These basic chemical building blocks are synthesized by a process known as polycondensation.

Both materials can be made from renewable resources derived from cellulose-containing waste from agriculture and forestry. Cellulose is broken down in a process, and the resulting sugars are fermented into succinic acid and butanediol using bacteria. In this way, 100% bio-based PBS can be produced from succinic acid and butanediol. This substance, along with polylactic acid (PLA), represents an important milestone in the transition to a bio-based plastics industry.

PBS is biodegradable and exhibits similar decomposition behavior to wood under suitable environmental conditions. Bacteria metabolize and break down PBS using their enzymes, leaving behind carbon dioxide and water as degradation products. If the use of biodegradable bioplastics were to increase in the future, the concerning spread of oil-based plastics in all biotopes of our planet could be reduced.

The new production of oil-based, non-degradable plastics must be reduced as soon as possible. On the path to a fully sustainable economy, at least the rate of reuse and recycling of oil-based plastics, including bioplastics, must be top priority.

PBS, like most conventional thermoplastic plastics, can be recycled. It can be detected and sorted in modern sorting facilities. This means that a prerequisite for the recycling of all plastics is a modern facility with optical material recognition techniques in place and waste separation already carried out by consumers.

Recovered PBS can be incorporated into new products. Fraunhofer IAP collaborates with industrial partners to increase the variety of PBS types and so expand the range of applications. Using PBS does not require new processing technologies. The bio-based material can be used for injection molding, film production, blow molding and thermoforming. The sustainable materials developed at IAP are on the verge of being launched on the market.

24 Glass panels from recycled crushed glass and surplus coated solar panels
Each 135 x 60 x 2 cm

Samples
6 Glass tiles made from recycled broken glass and surplus coated solar panels

Courtesy Magna Glaskeramik 

BlueBlocks: Seawood
Samples
Fibreboards made from brown seaweed
Courtesy BlueBlocks

RikMakes: Compostboard
Samples
Boards made from agricultural waste
Courtesy RikMakes

Shards – Fliesen aus Bauschutt
Samples
Tiles from debris
Courtesy Shards – Fliesen aus Bauschutt

Smile Plastics
Samples
Panels made from recycled plastic waste
Courtesy Smile Plastics

Spared
Samples
Recycled shell from the fishing industry

StoneCycling
Samples
Bricks from construction waste
Courtesy StoneCycling

UpBoards
Samples
Surface panels made from recycled plastic waste

The 21st century is on the brink of a radical paradigm shift in how much material is produced and used under what conditions. The linear concept of “produce, use, dispose of” has proven unsustainable for humans to live on this planet in light of scarce resources, exponentially growing waste, and a rapidly increasing global population. To minimize the extraction of natural resources, cycles of production, use, and reuse must be developed. These will not only reduce resource consumption but enable a transformation of economic practices, too.

Knowing, Acting, Caring as the mindset of changed action has produced different stages of production and a range of materials that are no longer just subjects of speculative research, but are available for real-world applications. The young companies selected here represent a new generation of firms that have developed their economic models in the spirit of transformation. Magna Glaskeramik, Blue Blocks Seawood, Compost Board, Shards Tiles from debris, Smile Plastics, Spared, Stone Cycling, UpBoards, and Mogu all symbolize innovative business practices in the areas of New Materials. Recycling, Urban Mining, and the use of naturally renewable and biodegradable raw materials form the core of their product ranges.

The first stage of changed resource consumption involves the approach of recycling current materials. The aim here is to recycle existing, often oil-based materials rather than wasting them. This not only reduces energy consumption through new production but also reduces the amount of waste ending up in landfills worldwide. Recycling thus contributes to conserving our limited natural resources and minimizing environmental pollution. The prerequisite for recycling is the separation of individual materials. As many products are designed as composites of numerous individual components, separation is often difficult, leading valuable materials to end up in landfills. Altered design, new production methods, and more efficient separation of individual materials are thus the new challenges.

Cities and the built environment are constantly changing. What remains are tons of debris from concrete, bricks and various other building materials. The remnants are disposed of as construction waste in landfills. The awareness is growing, however, that demolition can serve as a source of recyclable materials. Urban Mining is a new economy and process that extracts raw materials not from nature but from previously created demolition. In this way, valuable resources from urban waste and old products can be recovered. Techniques such as recycling, reuse, and processing are used to recover metals, plastics, electronics and other resources from households, commercial areas and industrial waste. Urban Mining helps reduce dependence on primary sources of raw materials and promotes a more sustainable use of resources in urban environments.

Shards is a young company based in Kassel that specializes in the sustainable utilization of waste from the construction industry by manufacturing tiles from construction debris. The tiles completely avoid the use of primary raw materials, giving a second life to mineral waste materials that would normally end up in landfills and simultaneously establishing a circular system. In case of damage, they can be recycled into new tiles without turning into waste. The palette of colors and surface textures is produced without the need for dyes and ranges from white, cream, brown, gray, and black to green and blue tones. They can be glossy, textured, or rough. In the production of Shards tiles, the company relies on renewable energy sources, completely eliminating the use of fossil fuels. Due to their sustainability, the company was awarded the Federal Eco-Design Prize in 2018 and the German Sustainability Design Award in 2021.

StoneCycling is a Dutch company based in Amsterdam that likewise aims to reduce the construction industry’s use of primary raw materials. While still a student, industrial designer Tom van Soest designed a mixer that pulverizes demolition waste such as window glass, bricks and concrete. He later transformed this process on a large scale with the founding of StoneCycling. The resulting powder is mixed and fired, with recycled glass serving as a binder. The material that comes out of the oven has stone-like properties. StoneCycling today produces bricks or tiles for sustainable construction projects. In the Bending the Curve exhibition, their products from the WasteBasedBricks series are presented. The bricks are made from at least 60% up to 100% recycled materials, contributing to waste reduction by upgrading from 91 kg to 150 kg of waste per square meter. Production is carbon-neutral and adheres to industry standards. WasteBasedBricks are suitable for both interior and exterior applications and can be delivered in customized shapes and sizes.

The company Magna Glaskeramik, based in Teutschenthal, produces design products using glass waste. For the Bending the Curve exhibition, the company presents an installation with floor tiles in the color Stormy Grey. Magna Glaskeramik manufactures plates from 100% recycled custom glass, consisting of differently colored and fused shards. The color palette includes gray produced from coated solar panels, blue from blue mineral water bottles, green from beer bottles, black from flawed gray flat glass production, and white from waste glass deriving from solar cell protective glass. During the production of flat, solar, colored or bottle glass, rejects, production defects and surpluses of approximately 5% of the total glass production occur. These industrial waste materials serve as the raw material source for the production of Magna Glaskeramik: they are broken into shards in a controlled manner and then undergo an elaborate compaction process called sintering, without the addition of binders or the use of pressure, only by means of temperature and time. The sintered plates are then cooled in special hoods. In the final processing stage, the raw plates are calibrated, polished on request, and cut to the final size. The energy required in the production process is generated from their own solar panels, and the water used in the manufacturing process is recycled and reused multiple times.

The Smile Plastics, Spared, and UpBoards companies present material samples from their product ranges in Bending the Curve, all made from 100% recycled plastic granules. Plastic waste can be molded into all kinds of forms. The resulting new materials have their own qualities and variously designed appearances. They are conceived for a wide range of applications that can be customized as needed. Additionally, the company Spared presents a sample of the composite material Molelk, which is made from recycled shells from the fishing industry. 6 to 8 million tons of shell waste are generated annually in the food industry, with the majority ending up in landfills.

The effort to recycle plastic is not limited to committed young companies in the design industry. Worldwide citizen movements, such as the Precious Plastic initiative, are also dedicated to this cause. The initiative was founded in the Netherlands by Dave Hakkens in 2012. The idea is based on a recycling tool Hakkens built himself: a shredder, an injection molding machine and a compression molding machine. Later, Hakkens made the blueprints for the “recycling infrastructure” available to everyone on the internet under the Creative Commons license, enabling some four hundred community-based workshops worldwide to join the movement.

This second stage of altered production focuses on the development and use of new materials that are organic and biodegradable. These materials serve as alternatives to conventional non-biodegradable plastics and chemicals. They are more environmentally friendly and break down faster after use, leaving as few harmful residues as possible or none at all. Such materials are crucial to reducing ocean and soil pollution.

The wood-like product CompostBoard is based on the principle of Zero Waste. The material is made from agricultural waste and is 100% biobased, renewable, and fully compostable. The fibers for CompostBoard come from the Netherlands (flax) and Belgium (hemp), and processing is done using traditional wood processing machinery and techniques such as milling, sawing and painting. The material promotes a circular economy, as it can be transformed into fertile soil for growing crops after use. The adhesive used is environmentally friendly and non-toxic, as it does not use oil-based substances. The adhesive is non-volatile and environmentally friendly. The compacted material remains intact as long as it is kept dry, offering advantageous properties to the user, such as breathability and a neutral indoor climate. It captures water vapor when the air is humid and releases it during dry periods. CompostBoard begins to decompose when exposed to rain for several days. After 7-14 days in contact with water, the material breaks down and can be digested by worms and insects.

SeaWood is the result of a collaboration between The Seaweed Company, North Sea Farmers, BlueCity, and Circular Factory. They produce fiberboard made from brown seaweed. SeaWood is a 100% natural, compostable and chemical-free board material that can be used as a building material for interior products and acoustic wall panels.

The third stage of transformative economics is currently being discussed under the concept of Regeneration. The term was coined by Paul Hawkens and envisions a shift in all aspects of production, extraction, consumption and reuse of things that people need for life. The central demand is that humanity leaves a planet capable of sustaining further life, and understands and respects ecosystems, climate and biodiversity. This goal can only be achieved through a radical cultural change, accompanied by the use of new methods and materials in as many areas of human life as possible.