Parable of the Moths

Laura Franzmann

Hugo Laporte

Gitte Maria Möller

Hannah Rose Stewart

Co-curated by Christina Gigliotti, Sigrid Hermann, and Catherine Wang

February 5 – February 26, 2022

The title of the exhibition Parable of the Moths draws inspiration from Octavia Butler’s science fiction novel Parable of the Sower (1993). Set in a not-so-far future in an environmentally damaged and socially tumultuous Southern California, the young protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina flees from her home to escape ecological and societal collapse. Lauren experiences unspeakable tragedy and loss, mostly due to the violence and desperation of those around her who are struggling to survive off of minimal resources. She soon starts to realize that the ways of her parents and older generations are no longer applicable to present-day catastrophe and begins to develop a new paradigm called Earthseed, which focuses on adaptation, trust, and change as necessities for finding meaning among the chaos, community building, and most importantly, survival.

Parable of the Moths presents work by Laura Franzmann, Hugo Laporte, Gitte Maria Möller, and Hannah Rose Stewart. Within their work, each of these artists grapples with their material and existential reality. By visually examining shared experience through storytelling, making, and recontextualizing the present, the works on view express, imagine and hope for a more ecologically and socially sound future.

Moths symbolize tremendous change. Interspersed throughout the exhibition, these winged creatures are in their final metamorphic stage, also known as the imaginal stage or imago. Etymologically linked to imagination, their transformative status allegorically alludes to the speculative space that the artists carve out from their collective reality.

“All that you touch you change.

All that you change changes you.

The only lasting truth is change.”

― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

Laura Franzmann (*1990, lives and works in Berlin) studied art at the HFBK Hamburg and Goldsmiths University of London. She works primarily with drawings and textiles, describing the protagonists of her work as mediators between a desirable narrative and the affiliation in which they remain in the here and now. In this the notion of embodiment and figurations play a crucial role, offering a pictorial and critical space to our social constructions. Her current research focuses on female deities as trans-historical living beings that are in a flux, or transformative process that serves to broker and question the artificial dualism of nature and culture.

Hugo Laporte (based in Noisy-le-sec, France) is a visual artist, musician, DJ, set designer and independent curator of French nationality and unknown origin. He graduated from Nîmes Music Conservatory where he studied violin for thirteen years. He completed his artistic education with a DNA at the Fine Art School of Nîmes and a DNSEP at the Fine Art School of Annecy. Now living on the edge of Paris, he builds on his plastic research based on the concepts of futuristic archeology and post-poor digital art. In 2020, he co-founded the Subaru, an ephemeral artist-run space currently based in Noisy-le-sec. Laporte is also a member of the team of "L'Aconservatoire" within the association A.M.I.S, based in Noisy-le-sec.

Gitte Maria Möller (*1991, lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa) received her BA in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2015 and was awarded the Judy Steinberg painting prize for her graduate show. In her efforts to form a union between her inner and outer reality, Möller creates a personalized arena for devotion in her pictures. The intricate visual spaces hold a complex array of signs, symbols and archetypes in suspension as the artist draws inspiration from ancient mythology, religious manuscripts, and prayer paintings to early video games and online fan art. Möller collaborated with Zimbabwean wire artist Farai Kanyemba in her most recent work. Möller’s work offers a distracted meditation on a world interpolated by empathy and apathy, freedom and vulnerability, and the struggle between g00d and 3vil.

Hannah Rose Stewart (*1994 in Whitley Bay, UK, currently based in Berlin) graduated from Central Saint Martins in London. Often manifesting in digital and physical installation, her work takes form as a historically inspired fantasy, as liminal ghosts, drifting from a place of inheritance and interface. Dreams and research intertwine becoming semi-effaced within the global network and take form, sometimes appearing as props from an unmade movie or game. She is concerned with imagining other worlds beyond the banality of capitalist realism, through architectural simulation, speculative fiction and trend research.

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