HYPNOPOMP, the exhibition by artist Iwajla Klinke, curated by Călina Coman at 2/3 Galeria, offers a contemplative exploration of the spaces between wakefulness and sleep, and between memory and imagination.
“The liminal denotes the intermediate zone in which the subject finds themselves between two states of existence, in a territory of uncertainty, potential, and indeterminacy. The most accessible form of such an experience appears in hypnagogic and hypnopompic states. The first precedes sleep, when consciousness fades into REM, and the other occurs in reverse, in pre-awakening, when the mind sends off sleep but does not yet reach the field of lucidity. It is a state belonging to an amorphous time in which images with dreamlike density unfold, and the real establishes itself as an archetypal space. It is within this phenomenological framework that Iwajla Klinke’s exhibition HYPNOPOMP is situated, proposing, through a sequence of portraits, a method of navigating and deconstructing transformation, transition, aspects related to gender, and contemporary ways of seeing.
Iwajla Klinke’s practice explores this interstitial zone through a kind of personal ceremonial approach. The artist frequently travels to various corners of the world to participate in and document photographic portraits during festivities, ceremonies, holidays, and major life-cycle events of young people, sidestepping sociocultural and ethnographic dimensions and instead pursuing the decontextualization of manifestations, disguises, and temporary identity transformations. Extracted from their communal sap and placed before a black backdrop, the figures appear like otherworldly presences from the mythologies of the initiatory path; they are familiar and yet uncanny faces, with recognizable physiognomies yet embodying another body — zoomorphic, in the case of Therian Infantes V and III — or another identity, in the case of the (pre)pubescent boys dressed as devout madonnas. Klinke’s focus falls precisely on these thresholds where the subject passes into another register.
In the Therian Infantes series, these transformations emanate a particular aura: the adolescents embody hybrid characters, sometimes masked, other times costumed, referencing aspects of pop (sub)culture — the tiger-like figures channel the gestural vocabulary of New York breakdancing from the late 1970s and early 1980s. Klinke expands in other series her reflections on gender transitions and cultural manifestations, for instance in Mexican Diaries and Pearls in Herod’s Eyes, or in the work Bee King — which alludes to a historically widespread belief (up to Shakespeare’s time) that the hive was not ruled by a queen but by a “king of the bees.” Klinke observes liminality in its plastic, malleable form, shaped by inherited iconographic representations, by the repertoire of pop culture, and perhaps most importantly, by the fragile and imaginative universe of adolescence.” (curatorial text)
Iwajla Klinke (b. 1976) is a Berlin-based visual artist whose work explores cultural identity, historical memory, as well as gender and masculinity through photography and mixed media. With a background in art history, Jewish Studies, and Islamic Studies at FU Berlin, she has exhibited widely in Germany and internationally, in cities such as Berlin, Paris, Vienna, São Paulo, Toronto, and New York. Her retrospective The Nymphs are Departed, hosted this year by the Diözesanmuseum München/Freising (March–August 2025), will feature nearly 40 large-format works. Her most recent project, Schöne Neue Welt, was shown at Galerie Anita Beckers in Frankfurt (2024). Klinke is celebrated for her evocative visual narratives and technical mastery.
The exhibition is organized by 2/3 Galeria in partnership with the German Cultural Center Iași, the Goethe-Institut, and Borderline Art Space.
