Are We Experienced. is an interdisciplinary exhibition curated by Kajsa Rhodin under the curatorial platform art is doing, bringing together Sofia Cruz Rocha, Kalina Horon, Lena Mattsson and Julia Bondesson. Through painting, moving image, sound and performance, the exhibition creates an immersive sensory environment moving between overstimulation and stillness, anxiety and presence, rupture and resonance. 

In a reality increasingly shaped by acceleration and invisible systems of control, where algorithms anticipate desire and endless image production disguises emotional fatigue as connection, anxiety has become a dominant force in contemporary life — keeping us in motion while disconnecting us from genuine experience. 

Are We Experienced. explores experience as something unstable, embodied and collective. What does it mean to truly experience something when our perception is constantly mediated and accelerated? Across their distinct practices, the four artists explore the space between inner and outer realities, where painting becomes resonance, abstraction becomes rhythm, and moving image and performance challenge our perception of time, space and the body. 

Through colour, form, movement and duration, their works invite us to slow down and reconnect with our senses, emotions and attention beyond the logic of productivity and passive consumption. A painted surface becomes a space of transformation; an image shifts our understanding of what we see; a gesture moves between control and surrender. Each work opens a space between material and meaning, stillness and intensity, perception and presence.

Extending this inquiry, a print of Sophie Calle’s Chambre avec vue, from the curator’s collection, brings the intimate act of listening to stories into the exhibition. Emerging from Calle’s overnight performance in a room at the top of the Eiffel Tower, the work connects personal narratives, strangers’ presence and the uncertain boundary between lived experience and memory. It invites us to consider how an experience becomes meaningful through attention, encounter and the stories we share. 

Rather than offering an escape from contemporary anxieties, Are We Experienced. invites us to encounter them differently — to reconnect with our most powerful selves through presence, sensation and the possibility of genuine experience. What does it mean to be fully human, and fully experienced?

(Kajsa Rodin)

Sofia Cruz Rocha (born 1989 in Mexico City) is an artist who lives and works in Vienna. Working across painting and installation, her practice connects contemporary art with spiritual and hermetic thought, considering universal principles, the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm, and the development of human consciousness. In her work, painting can be approached as a transformative and metaphysical medium: colour, gesture and the physical presence of the painted surface become ways of exploring inner and outer realities and the resonances between perception, emotion and change. Her practice extends beyond the autonomous painted image. The project Afecciones (2014), supported by Mexico’s FONCA programme, took the form of a house conceived as a walk-through installation. This attention to how a viewer inhabits and experiences a work sits alongside her ongoing interest in spirituality, symbolic structures and the possibility of art as an encounter that is both sensory and inward-facing.

sofiacruzrocha.com

Kalina Horon (born 1992 in Poland) is a painter who lives and works in Vienna. Her current practice explores abstraction through free improvisation, using colour, gesture and the interplay of forms to build compositions in which individual elements respond to and influence one another. Her paintings can be understood as visualisations of emotional, social and worldly tensions: rather than resolving these forces into a fixed narrative, they create shifting relationships between rhythm, intensity, balance and stillness. Horon’s approach draws on an understanding of composition and colour, while leaving space for spontaneity and movement. Earlier in her studies she experimented with several media, including performance, video, animation and improvised electric-violin music, before focusing primarily on painting. This background offers a useful context for the sense of rhythm and embodied attention in her abstract work, which invites viewers to experience a painting as an active visual field rather than a passive image.

kalinahoron.net

Lena Mattsson (b. 1966, Kungshamn, Bohuslän, Sweden) is a Swedish artist who lives and works in Malmö. Working across video, film, photography and performance, she explores how images shape perception and how what appears familiar can become uncertain or uncanny. Drawing on art history and cinematic language, her work often unsettles the boundary between what is seen and what is interpreted through personal experience and cultural reference.

lenamattsson.net


Julia Bondesson (b. 1983, Kinnared, Sweden) lives and works in Åled, Sweden. Her practice centres on the body and its fragments, using predominantly wood alongside materials such as paint, stain, neon, rope and textiles. Drawing on sculpture, traditional puppetry and performance, she creates forms that can appear vulnerable, animated or suspended between object and subject. When activated in performance or video, the works become collaborators in a choreography between artist, material and movement. 

bonju.org