Linda Marwan is an interdisciplinary installation artist. She employs sculpture, painting, and digital media to create concentrated ensembles. Within these works, animals, plants, hybrid beings, and her own body often take center stage, forming symbiotic relationships. Influenced by gaming as […]
Linda Marwan is an interdisciplinary installation artist. She employs sculpture, painting, and digital media to create concentrated ensembles. Within these works, animals, plants, hybrid beings, and her own body often take center stage, forming symbiotic relationships.
Influenced by gaming as well as the fantasy and horror genres, she analyzes their aesthetic and thematic characteristics, deconstructs them, and recombines their elements. Her focus lies on the significance of aesthetic qualities as factors in the creation of atmosphere.
She investigates the epistemological significance of the body as a space of experience and its recontextualization beyond societal and systemic objectification. This includes an analysis of its relationship with the environment as well as digital and imaginary spaces.
Marwan studied at HBK Braunschweig and HGB Leipzig, where she graduated in 2019 with a diploma as a fine artist. Her theoretical diploma thesis, titled State instead of Image, explored the atmospheric impact and the relevance of sensory experience in generating meaning. Her awards include the residency grant of the Kunstverein Röderhof e.V. (2020) and the work grant for digital mediation formats from the Deutscher Künstlerbund (2022). In 2022, she was a Local Participant at the PILOTENKÜCHE International Art Program in Leipzig. She lives and works in Leipzig.With Artificial Fantasy, funded by the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony in 2023, she realized a non-commercial solo exhibition focusing on the generic aspects of the fantasy genre and the concept of environmental storytelling in video games.
About the project
Entity Environment Annihilation places subjective corporeality into a state of transformation. Landscapes are no longer mere locations but active, autonomous entities—and the monster is not a threat but an invitation to change. In a symbiosis of painting and sculpture, bodies and landscapes merge.
A diverse dataset of various landscape views is compiled, including, for example, images from the Romantic era or screenshots from video games. This collection is analyzed using artificial intelligence to examine its specifics in terms of form, light, and color. The resulting insights—diffuse, atmospheric, and fragmentary—serve as the basis for large-scale paintings. Unlike the Romantic landscape, which was meant to be imbued with inner states, this project focuses on bodily experience within the situatedness of the environment. The landscape is not perceived as a backdrop but as a space of experience where identity becomes unstable.
Additionally, a series of sculptures is created. Using 3D modeling and scanning techniques, hybrid beings are designed, drawing from concepts of the monstrous. The monster reflects the fear of one’s own transformation, of dissolution and mutation. As hybrid creatures combining animal, human, and object, they point to an epistemic crisis: In the awareness of one’s own permeability and the dissolution into a web of mutual dependencies, the notion of the autonomous individual is revealed as a partial fiction.The monstrosity lies in the mutation of the familiar. Repetition — whether in algorithmic image generation or pop-cultural representations — is not merely ornamental but the mechanism by which the similar becomes uncanny and the familiar turns alien. The annihilation of subjective boundaries becomes an expansion of bodily experience—through hybridization as both monster and landscape. This occurs through atmospheric immersion in the environment and the dissolution of self-centered boundaries.
The project is an experimental sketch of a speculative future in which neither humans nor the environment remain fixed categories. It poses the question: What does it mean to exist in a world that must change? And how do we deal with the fear that, in the process of these changes, we may have to dissolve parts of ourselves?
Photos: Galya Feierman
