Magical Rage
Clara Bahlsen
Villa Heike Kunstverein
13.09. – 18.10.2025
The photographic series Magical Rage by Clara Bahlsen presents meticulously staged still lifes in which everyday objects—stones, rivets, potatoes, and tree trunks; an animal jawbone, or a printer and mobile phone—are removed from their usual context and brought together in dense, tension-filled arrangements. By placing these things into new, unexpected constellations, Bahlsen strips them of their everyday function, granting them instead a symbolic, almost allegorical quality. In the studio, Bahlsen stacks, balances, and stages the objects with one another so that they enter into precarious equilibria and contradictory relationships.
The conceptual foundation of Magical Rage draws on Freud’s notion of sublimation: the transformation of raw, often destructive impulses into culturally valued forms. Freud’s 1904 essay on Michelangelo’s Moses serves as a reference point: Moses restrains his rage against the idolatrous people and protects the tablets of the law rather than shattering them in anger. For Bahlsen, this image of sublimated rage—anger held back in favor of a higher responsibility—becomes a conceptual touchstone for her own translation of affect.
Here, photography becomes a medium of psychic transference. The staged objects condense gestures, affects, and latent conflicts into forms that both reveal and conceal. At times, the arrangements appear archival, like fragments of a private mythology pointing to a story that cannot be fully told. They elude any final interpretation because Bahlsen combines things in such a way that they oscillate within ambivalent fields of meaning. The images thus function as stand-ins for psychic energies that are neither easily named nor entirely hidden.
Some photographs hang on the wall in raw metal frames, while others stand freely in space, affixed to a metal pole anchored in an artificial stone. In line with the visual traps of the images and their mythic or artificial-seeming object constellations, the pedestals themselves turn out to be illusions. They underscore the constructedness of the pictorial arrangements in the still lifes and consistently carry Bahlsen’s artistic approach into the exhibition space.
Alongside the photographs, accompanying autofictional short texts provide fragmentary glimpses into family dynamics and the memories they evoke. Like the photographic still lifes, these texts work with allusions, ruptures, and blanks. They resist linear narration and allow anger to emerge as a complex and ambivalent phenomenon that cannot be clearly defined or resolved. Together, the photographs and texts form a dialogue in which visual and verbal registers mirror one another, tracing the latent energies of rage across different levels.
In a world marked by polarization and emotional loss of control, Magical Rage opens a field of tension in which the layered complexities of inner conflict are brought into relation, and rage as a raw, contradictory emotional state is translated into an enigmatic visual language.
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Clara Bahlsen lives and works in Berlin. In her artistic practice, she investigates how relationships and states of relation can be translated into visual forms. Her photographs, installations, and books transform interpersonal dynamics into dense, multi-layered image-worlds.
Central points of departure are found objects and memory objects from her personal archive. Some objects are carefully researched, others spontaneously integrated. Through their staging in still lifes—the interplay of different pictorial levels, captured photographically in analogue form—images emerge that condense reality and transform it into an independent visual language.
Bahlsen studied at the Berlin University of the Arts and was part of the postgraduate class of Prof. Ute Mahler and Robert Lyons at the Ostkreuz School of Photography, Berlin. Her works are shown internationally, including at the Kunstverein Hannover, the Kommunale Galerie Berlin, Photo Saint-Germain, Paris, and IACK Kanazawa, Japan. She has received numerous awards and grants, among them a grant from the German Künstlerbund and the Aenne Biermann Prize for Contemporary German Photography.
Her books are represented at international art book fairs and are included in renowned collections such as the Library of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo. She has taught photography at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, Germany, as well as in the MFA Photography program at the University of Hartford, USA.
The conceptual foundation of Magical Rage draws on Freud’s notion of sublimation: the transformation of raw, often destructive impulses into culturally valued forms. Freud’s 1904 essay on Michelangelo’s Moses serves as a reference point: Moses restrains his rage against the idolatrous people and protects the tablets of the law rather than shattering them in anger. For Bahlsen, this image of sublimated rage—anger held back in favor of a higher responsibility—becomes a conceptual touchstone for her own translation of affect.
Here, photography becomes a medium of psychic transference. The staged objects condense gestures, affects, and latent conflicts into forms that both reveal and conceal. At times, the arrangements appear archival, like fragments of a private mythology pointing to a story that cannot be fully told. They elude any final interpretation because Bahlsen combines things in such a way that they oscillate within ambivalent fields of meaning. The images thus function as stand-ins for psychic energies that are neither easily named nor entirely hidden.
Some photographs hang on the wall in raw metal frames, while others stand freely in space, affixed to a metal pole anchored in an artificial stone. In line with the visual traps of the images and their mythic or artificial-seeming object constellations, the pedestals themselves turn out to be illusions. They underscore the constructedness of the pictorial arrangements in the still lifes and consistently carry Bahlsen’s artistic approach into the exhibition space.
Alongside the photographs, accompanying autofictional short texts provide fragmentary glimpses into family dynamics and the memories they evoke. Like the photographic still lifes, these texts work with allusions, ruptures, and blanks. They resist linear narration and allow anger to emerge as a complex and ambivalent phenomenon that cannot be clearly defined or resolved. Together, the photographs and texts form a dialogue in which visual and verbal registers mirror one another, tracing the latent energies of rage across different levels.
In a world marked by polarization and emotional loss of control, Magical Rage opens a field of tension in which the layered complexities of inner conflict are brought into relation, and rage as a raw, contradictory emotional state is translated into an enigmatic visual language.
//
Clara Bahlsen lives and works in Berlin. In her artistic practice, she investigates how relationships and states of relation can be translated into visual forms. Her photographs, installations, and books transform interpersonal dynamics into dense, multi-layered image-worlds.
Central points of departure are found objects and memory objects from her personal archive. Some objects are carefully researched, others spontaneously integrated. Through their staging in still lifes—the interplay of different pictorial levels, captured photographically in analogue form—images emerge that condense reality and transform it into an independent visual language.
Bahlsen studied at the Berlin University of the Arts and was part of the postgraduate class of Prof. Ute Mahler and Robert Lyons at the Ostkreuz School of Photography, Berlin. Her works are shown internationally, including at the Kunstverein Hannover, the Kommunale Galerie Berlin, Photo Saint-Germain, Paris, and IACK Kanazawa, Japan. She has received numerous awards and grants, among them a grant from the German Künstlerbund and the Aenne Biermann Prize for Contemporary German Photography.
Her books are represented at international art book fairs and are included in renowned collections such as the Library of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo. She has taught photography at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, Germany, as well as in the MFA Photography program at the University of Hartford, USA.
