Cara Broekmann
Art Historian
Recommended works
Painting
Sandro Santalucia
Sandro Santalucia studies intermedia with a focus on artistic research at the UzK. His painting is driven by the impulse to give form to archetypes, inner states, and elusive sensations in a way that is both concrete and abstract. Inspired by the people around him, his figurative paintings with surreal elements are based on spontaneous mental images that serve as references with the help of photography and digital collages. Thematically, transgression, i.e., the crossing of norms and conformities, often plays a central role.
Juliana Pak's unique visual language combines pop culture motifs with speculative, science fiction-inspired aesthetics.
Paek's works revolve around themes such as identity, belonging, nationality, and the relationship between humans and technology. Based on her examination of the Korean “Gokbo” (족보)—a patriarchal genealogy book—she develops counter-archives and personal mythologies that reflect her hybrid position between East and West, Korea and Germany.
In her oil painting and installation practice, Paek explores hybrid identities and their intertwining with technological developments. In doing so, she combines questions of ethnicity, gender, and social structures with posthumanist concepts and links contemporary reality with art-historical traditions.
Juliana Paek
Painting
Anna Bochkova
Sculpture
“There is an intense connection between ceramics and the human soul.”
In her work, Anna Bochkova creates a poetic utopia: delicate, emotional ceramic figures encounter each other in cardboard architectures reminiscent of post-Soviet prefabricated buildings. In doing so, she breaks with clichés of concrete as a symbol of coldness and anonymity and shows how tenderness can arise even in harsh environments.
Having grown up in a prefabricated housing estate, Bochkova explores how architecture shapes our relationships and emotions. Her “Conceptual Creatures” embody hybrid, sometimes extraterrestrial beings, influenced by Eastern European science fiction and Russian cosmism—utopian narratives about community, care, and responsibility. For her, the fragile, unpredictable nature of ceramics reflects the vulnerability of human existence.
