Looking back on a long-term project developed for the Dutch Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, bonajo engages in a dialogue with the students on how the body can be understood as a site of knowledge, creativity and political agency. The analysis of this specific project focuses on somatic practices that use sensation and touch as primary tools to help people deepen their perception and sense of connection.
In an era characterised by alienation and post-truth, the proposed approach explores how rebuilding relationships with the body can counteract loneliness, reconnect us with our value systems, and expand our capacity to feel, build and shape relationships.
melanie bonajo (they/them) is a queer, non-binary, Dutch artist, filmmaker, feminist, sexological body therapist and animal rights activist. In their videos, performances, photographs and installations, they question the current dilemmas of coexistence within a paralysing capitalist system and address the loss of intimacy and isolation in an increasingly sterile, technologised world. For the most part, bonajo’s experimental documentaries explore communities living or working on the margins of society – whether through illegal means or cultural exclusion – as well as the paradoxes inherent in notions of comfort alongside a strong sense of community, equality and the ‘body politic’. bonajo’s works have been exhibited and screened internationally, from the Tate Modern and MoMA PS1 to the De Appel Arts Centre and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, as well as at Manifesta 12, the Gwangju Biennale, the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, the Kunsthalle Basel, the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), the Berlinale, the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Treefort Film Fest.
This event is part of the Schlaglicht series, organised by the Class for Multidimensional Strategies in collaboration with Katja Kottmann (Basisklasse) and is open to everyone at the Kunsthochschule and the University of Kassel.
Date & Venue
27 May 2026, 5 pm
Lecture Hall, Kunsthochschule Kassel