Lulu Cora Süss builds sculptures from things that already had a life. She works with objects marked by prior function and cultural meaning: Wild or domesticated, coded as masculine or feminine. She takes them apart and recomposes them by cutting, welding, sewing and casting, appropriating the codes they carry, and claiming them becomes an act of empowerment. The material is treated like a body in transition, and transformation becomes a form of authorship.

it dripped and it sparkled and I laughed a wish, her second solo exhibition at KALI Gallery, centres on motorcycle exhaust pipes – objects loudly coded with an aggressive performance of masculinity and claimed by bikers, freeriders and dykes alike. For Süss, they are props in a performance of gender, which she restages on her own terms.

The exhausts meet handbags, chains, rings and jewellery. Most works hang on the wall, frontal and near-symmetrical, somewhere between emblem, mask and armour, and many trail a long braid of pink silicone.

The sculptures refuse to pass – to be read as “natural”. Following the trans theorists Susan Stryker and Sandy Stone, who reclaimed the figure of the monster, they stay visibly assembled, contradictory and unresolved. For Süss, staying in between is an ethical and political stance.

____________________________________________________________________________________

if wishes had bodies, how would they move through space? gently? with a deep sense of expectation? with excitement for what is to come? or rather with a distinct politeness, making themselves hardly distinguishable from their surroundings - to avoid recognition, to mask their trail and inherent potential, so as not to jinx what they might turn into? would they even care?

hard to speak for wishes. easy to speak for the self, with enough training and a carefully calibrated equalizer of one's ego. among all the muses of olden and present days, Visibility has always been the most daring, danger-seeking, attention-toying, cunty little devil.
Wishes, Visibility and the Self walk into a bar and… you guessed it… no longer a joke by the end of the night…

***

tin. tin foil. tin soldiers. augury from poured molten tin - formerly lead, but that one is toxic, so rather not. and the Tin Man, ofc, how could i forget. Dorothy found him rusting in the forest, even though pure tin doesn't rust, it only oxidizes. was it the empty space for the silk heart he was to receive from the Wizard that made this wonder possible? and at the beginning and end of everything there are always iPhones and such. what would they be without tin? what would hold all those endlessly tiny components together on their boards?

why are we even talking about tin, when the foils are actually aluminum? the foil hat goes all the way back to Julian Huxley, brother of Brave New World's Aldous Huxley. sometime in the 1920s he wrote a story about people wearing metal-foil caps to avoid mind control, just as aluminum foil was starting to push tin off the shelves and out of many minds. decades later, with our time's love affair with conspiracy theories in full bloom, a group of MIT students ran a tongue-in-cheek study on foil helmets and found that while they block most radio frequencies, they actually amplify some others - a recipe for your neighborhood mind-controller.

turns out there is tin in the machinery of a motorbike too, you just never see it: in the soft bearing layers that wear down so the steel doesn't have to, in bronze bushings, in the solder of its electronics. same as in our phones, tin serves as a coating, as something connecting things together, something invisible, underneath the surface, hiding among its surroundings to avoid Visibility. tin is the ultimate master of invisibility. take that, J.K. Rowling.

***

a friend once told me that continuously oscillating, performing the so-called genderfuck in the long term, is a dangerous road to embark on, no matter how strong your bike's engine might be. she herself decided to transition into passing. there is power in community, though. maybe that's why the works always come in numbers, one for almost every wall. they project such determined clarity about who they are. and yet, for all their seeming symmetry, their precise paint jobs and the careful curation of each individual segment, space remains for reconfiguration. for movement. pass them through a portal to the digital realm and they start swirling in endless transformations, their purses, little trinkets and other attributes falling off, thrusting into the air and landing as silent meteorites. where is the rusty Tin Person now, to collect them and wear it all proudly?

***

an Oracle, a Tin Person, Visibility and Wishes walk into a bar and see works by Lulu Cora Süss all over the walls. they freeze for a moment, look at each other with little mischievous smiles, then settle in as if it were the first season of Sex and the City and have their cosmopolitans with joy.

Jen Kratochvil