The title of Sarah Szczesny's exhibition refers to an animation sequence from her work ‘The gown will need to do all sorts of crazy wonderful things, you know, so that it doesn't restrict me’ from 2023, for which she re-edited and looped a scene from the documentary film ‘Unzipped’ by Douglas Keeve. In this scene, the fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi meets the singer and actress Eartha Kitt to talk to her about an evening dress designed for her - whereupon she performs a spontaneous dance to express her desire for freedom.

In the artothek, Sarah Szczesny presents ‘Smoke it, Burn it (Trickpictures) 1-5’, a sequence of five large-format paintings showing similar pictorial motifs, each with slight shifts and changes. With these new works, she refers to her animation ‘Smoke it Burn it (Sabine)’ from 2023, which consists of individual, reworked photographs.

The exhibited works are dedicated to the ephemeral: Small gestures are endlessly strung together in the visual material. The painting moves onto costumes, onto fabrics, into videos; it is animated, mounted over photography and film and flows fragilely through the space, projected without a frame. The supposedly monumental painting becomes a film still, practising mistakes. Precise bumpiness. Slapstick. Real life and the handmade coexist or merge.