Julia Jesionek, Everythingness, 2024 © Julia Jesionek

The exhibition will open on October 10 at 6 PM as part of the Leverkusen Art Night.
At 8 PM, there will be an artist talk with the artist (more information about the Leverkusen Art Night program is available at www.lust-auf-leverkusen.de/kunstnacht).

»Introspection - a turn towards emotion, and at the same time - like a T-shirt worn inside out - I want to turn the inner world outward, to adopt a new perspecitve and gaze, headfirst, into an inverted reality. « ⸺Julia Jesionek  

Cologne-based artist Julia Jesionek (born 1998 in Gifhorn) is this year’s recipient of the KHM Award for Artists (FLINTA*). Her work explores themes of femininity, identity, and introspection. Personal experiences, memories, and emotions merge in her films and paintings with fictional and fantastical elements, offering a glimpse into an intimate and vulnerable inner world. With humor, honesty, and a poetic, contemplative attitude, she questions our relationship to socially imposed conventions, corporeality, subjectivity, and the boundaries between interior and exterior. The exhibition title Self as Spell refers both to the recurring motif of the self-portrait in her visual narratives and to the theme of self-determination.

The exhibition at Museum Morsbroich presents a selection of her filmic works, including Jesionek’s autofictional animated film Everythingness (2024), which was shortlisted for the German Short Film Award 2024. The presentation is complemented by paintings, including new works from the series Soft Spot and Prinzessin and Made, which explore the simultaneity and ambivalence of seemingly contradictory qualities and emotional states of the self.

Julia Jesionek studied Media Arts at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM) from 2016 to 2024, completing her studies in 2024. In her graduate thesis Animating Women: The Evolution of Female Characters and the Impact of Women Animators (2023), she examines the history of women in animation since the 1970s from a feminist perspective.

The KHM Award for Emerging Artists (FLINTA*), endowed with 1,000 euros, has been awarded annually since 2020 through a cooperation between the Gender Equality Office of the KHM and Museum Morsbroich. The aim of the award is to support and connect emerging artists at the threshold of entering the professional art world and to present their work to a wider audience.

Supported by: