In her solo exhibition Hast du jetzt etwa deinen Humor verloren (Have you lost your sense of humor), Juli Schmidt deals with family relationships and the traces they leave on our bodies. The focus is on a series of large-format photographs that appear humorous at first glance, but reveal complex dynamics on closer inspection.
We see scenes that are reminiscent of everyday life in Western nuclear families. However, the protagonists in these situations are not people, but chicken eggs. They are sitting on kitchen chairs and sofas or are in other domestic settings. Their shells are deformed, dented or show small cracks – traces that indicate stress, heredity or external influences. In this way, they open up new perspectives on the body, materiality and touch – they show how social conditions shape the body. Carefully composed, permeated by light and shadow, with clear lines and reduced props, the pictures are reminiscent of painting in their aesthetics, but also of absurd theater. Between everyday gesture and quiet irritation, they tell of belonging and exclusion, of role models, conformity and subtle forms of resistance. The photographs reflect a quiet criticism of familial ideals. Schmidt focuses her attention on transgenerational dynamics, which sometimes make dysfunctional relationship patterns visible and point to the repressed and unspoken. Socially stylized notions of the intact nuclear family are thus called into question.
The series is presented in an expansive wooden installation in collaboration with Felix op den Winkel. Ir is reminiscent of the floor plan of an apartment, appears open and closed at the same time, creating views and distances. The room cannot be entered, it can only be experienced from the outside. In this way, what family structures entail also becomes spatially clear: Closeness and narrowness, intimacy and inaccessibility.
Hast du jetzt etwa deinen Humor verloren (Have you lost your sense of humor) invites us to understand family not as a fixed structure, but as a social practice in which power, care and friction are closely interwoven. With subtle humor and a keen eye for detail, Juli Schmidt draws our attention to what otherwise often goes unsaid.
Idea: Juli Schmidt
Photographs: Juli Schmidt
Installation: Juli Schmidt, Felix op den Winkel
Juli Schmidt (*1986 in Stralsund) is a visual artist based in Berlin. In objects, photographs and videos, she deals with bodies, their fluid boundaries and fluid materialities. She understands photography as a medium of representation and social practice in order to destabilize (in)visibilities and make structural power hierarchies visible. She studied photography at the HGB Leipzig with a guest semester in the sculpture class of Prof. Monica Bonvicini at the UdK Berlin and graduated in 2022 in the class of Prof. Heidi Specker. Since completing her studies, she has worked continuously on individual artistic projects, but also collaboratively. She has participated in various group exhibitions in German-speaking countries and abroad (e.g. at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien in Berlin, Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna, Galerie MMB Goethe-Institut in Mumbai), conceives and leads artistic workshops and is a performer and singer.
www.julischmidt.de
PROGRAM
Artist Talk
with Juli Schmidt and Annika Turkowski
9.7.2025 // 19:00
unfamiliar archives
Workshop with Danila Lipatov & Karen Zimmermann
12.7.2025 // 13:00-16:00
No previous knowledge necessary, limited number of participants (max. 10).
Please register via mail@galeriefutura.de.
In this workshop, we would like to explore family archives and create speculative spaces of memory with the help of collective narrative practices and physical improvisations.
Danila Lipatov (grew up in Moscow) and Karen Zimmermann (grew up in Remscheid) studied together at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and graduated in 2020 and 2023. Since 2017, they have been working together at the intersection of performance, visual and mediating art, and experimental documentary film. Using autofictional methods, performative reconstructions of archive and interview fragments, they question established narratives and create collaborative spaces that interweave personal stories, facts and fictions to sketch queer archival landscapes.
Beyond Nuclear Family
Book presentation with Veronika Cechová & Tereza Jindrová
16.7.2025 // 19:00 (in English)
The publication Beyond Nuclear Family completes the project of the same name, through which the curatorial team of the Jindřich Chalupecký Society attempted to grasp the theme of various forms of families. The project included a series of exhibitions and events implemented in 2020-23.
The book consists of curatorial essays, as well as texts by guest writers. Moreover ist it is the documentation of the project’s various iterations including a group exhibition at alpha nova & galerie futura.
Two of the project curators, Veronika Čechová and Tereza Jindrová, will present the book in a form of fragmented reading and will introduce four selected artworks that embody the different layers of the project.
