With the direct question “…or do you love your blinders?”, sculptor Cornelia Herfurtner highlights the mechanisms of willful blindness and denial in our society.
Image gallery
Marketerie der Künstlerin Cornelia Herfurtner
The artist asks how people respond to the omnipresent visibility of violence and war. The exhibition title highlights the contradiction between relatively secure everyday life and global crises, pointing to strategies of self-isolation, desensitization, and deliberate distancing.
From this perspective, Herfurtner’s art intensively engages with the legal concept of passive arming, which criminalizes the carrying of everyday protective items during demonstrations, and illustrates how state order is based on control, the manipulation of perception, and the restriction of self-protection in public spaces.
With her solo exhibition …oder liebst du deine Scheuklappen? (…or do you love your blinders?), Herfurtner continues her previous research on political self-protection practices in public space and addresses how the boundaries between private and public spaces are shifting. In installations featuring carved wooden reliefs, models, marquetry (wood inlays), and dough impressions, the artist combines traditional craft techniques with current social issues. Her works illustrate how actions typically attributed to the private sphere—such as eating and sleeping—can take on political dimensions in public spaces. In Herfurtner’s work, motifs and found objects from everyday life refer to reproductive activities, care work, and protest practices, revealing how perception, power, and social order are intertwined.
