Monkey Dance (Affentanz) 4

In her works which are conceived in groups or series, Asta Gröting investigates the body’s individual, collective and political roles. To render the emotional and physical chasms between people and things visible, she transforms voids, internal parts, and inner sounds into concrete forms and reinterprets what is inside. In her group of works titled "Monkey Dance", hundreds of jackets the artist found at a textile export-import store in Düsseldorf in the 1980s are sown together; either in a line, or, reminiscent of the choreography of a dance, in the form of a circle. The jackets manufactured from processed sheepskin and designed for the human body are made to stand on their four legs again. After being skinned and tanned in Anatolia, sown in Istanbul, and finally shipped to Germany, these leather jackets are returned to their original animal forms and symbolise how the capitalist system runs through global networks. Due to their uncanny anthropomorphic forms, these lined up jackets also remind us of leapfrog, a local game in which the strong ones enduring the weight of the others win.