By Her Own Movement

The exhibition stems from Sonja Thomsen's 2020 book You Will Find It Where It Is: A Reader—a complex and layered meditation that merges artistic practice, scientific questions, and feminist theory through alternative perspectives: from 18th-century mathematician Maria Agnesi to 19th-century writer Margaret Fuller, to the photography of Lucia Moholy and the conceptual sculpture of Maria Nordman, while also touching on Goethe's theory of color and Thomsen's own life experiences. The title of the exhibition, By Her Own Movement, references an essay in Hélène Cixous’s The Laugh of the Medusa (1975), in which the feminist critic encourages women to liberate their bodies from the pre-established language rooted in a conventional, male-dominated view of society. Through a narrative composed of spatial and temporal multiplicity, and by emphasizing light as both material and metaphor, Sonja leads the viewer to new reflections and the possibility of imagining post-patriarchal futures.