The burden of affirmation unfolds as a layered narrative, where the boundaries between the living and the artificial are blurred. This story explores intimacy, corporeality, and the tension between organic materials and man-made constructs. Anna Maria Zuzela’s works delve into themes of resilience and fragility through tactile forms. The artist addresses the themes of the body with remarkable sensitivity in response to contemporary dilemmas and the oppression faced by bodies—especially those culturally alienated and stigmatized.
The layered lines simulate the sensation of skin, a surface that absorbs, resists, and transforms. Zuzela often combines performative approaches with her artistic process, using materials such as ceramics, metal, or textiles to push the boundaries between the organic and the industrial, the ephemeral and the enduring, the human and the non-human.
This interweaving of forms proposes attentiveness in traversing the terrain of desire, vulnerability, and transformation, and an alternative view of time in which past and present collapse into a single, shifting narrative. Through Zuzela’s paintings and sculptural installations, the artist seeks to explore themes of materiality and transformation, using both controlled craftsmanship and the unpredictable nature of manual techniques to create a dynamic, tactile installation that bridges the organic and the industrial. These works pose critical questions about the nature of intimacy and the ways in which bodies, objects, and images occupy space and memory.