We are proud to announce the participation of gallery artist Beatriz Morales in this year’s Summer Program at Art Biesenthal 2025: Some Degree of Friction.
Curated by Tjioe Meyer Hecken and inspired by A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari (1987) and The Forest Maker by Volker Schlöndorff (2022), this exhibition runs from July 19th to August 31st.
The program features over 25 artists including Amanda Donato, Anne Imhof, Beatriz Morales, Billie Clarken, Christine Liebich, Daniel Hölzl, Elena Francalanci, Evangelia Dalton, Hani Hape, Jade Cassidy, Jenna Sutela, Ju Young Kim, Lena Marie Emrich, Lorenz Rost, Lukas Heerich, Madelen Isa Lindgren, Mirko Mielke, Natalie Brehmer, Ornella Fieres, Precious Okoyomon, Rebecca Horn, Rosa Barba, Rosa Merk, Sally von Rosen, Seongwon Park, Sofiia Stepanova, Tim Schmid, Yngve Holen, and many more.
Hosted within the community-driven and artist-centered environment of the Wehrmuehle Museum, the program will take place across seven weekends (Saturdays and Sundays, from 12 PM to 7 PM) featuring performances, dance, sound art, workshops and engaging interactions.
Beatriz Morales is participating in this years edition of Art Biesenthal with two carefully selected works: Ts’ul I and Ts’ul (Bauhaus). Two major installations that fill the space of the historic Wehrmühle Museum while connecting architecture and the surrounding nature seamlessly.
Extracted from a local agave, henequen is a resistant fibre, a type of hemp from which traditionally ropes and bags were made for packaging all sorts of agricultural products. Formerly known as Ki, it was a source of wealth for the Maya before it became a source of profit during the colonial era. While largely replaced by synthetic materials, it is still in use today. In her work, Morales’ weaves the fibres into monumental, room filling installations as well as a series of works suspended loosely like tapestries or the hides of mystical animals, as exemplified by her artwork Ts’ul I.
A breakthrough in her investigation of this natural material as well as the cultural charge and inherent substance it carries occurred in early 2021, when the artist decided to combine her innovative use of the traditional fibre with pre-hispanic dyeing techniques. While in Mexico, Morales honed her craft by learning from one of the last master dyers working with orally transmitted pre-hispanic dyeing techniques. Beatriz Morales is connecting with cultural, pre-colonial roots that provide nourishment to an artistic vision that points into an integrative future. While the jump-off points for her explorations are necessarily biographical, Morales’ fibre art invites reflection and discourse from multiple angles: the aesthetic, the historical, the political, the psycho-individual, and the spiritual.
The act of reconnection itself becomes an essential part of the artistic process, not merely in order to preserve what was, but above all to illuminate the multiplicity of the strands that form our individual mental and spiritual tapestries, and that make us who we are.
First shown at Kunsthalle Dessau, the city of Bauhaus, in 2023, this installation piece is an homage to Gunda Stölzl, the famous textile art pioneer who lead the weaving class at Bauhaus in the 1950s and 60s. Specifically, Morales references Stölzl’s color palette in this work, which was presented in the exhibition The Way Things Go, curated by Esenija Bannan.
Ts’ul is a Mayan word meaning “foreigner” or “the other”. The feeling of otherness is a recurring theme in Beatriz Morales’ art. According to the artist, sometimes it is a motivating factor, pushing her to explore her own “otherness”, at other times it is a constraint she aims to transcend and subvert in order to connect with the world. “Formal abstraction which is nurtured by tradition and history”, she says, “is the best conduit I have found to harness both.”