The hidden traces, 2026
Spor Klübü, Berlin
Installation: Hidden traces, 2026
ballpoint pen, stainless steel chains, real hair, variable dimensions
Sculpture: Giverny, 2026
glas, nail polish on wood, 100 x 94 x 55 cm
Collage from the serie cut (ARTFORUM) and cut (space)
collages made from offset prints
The exhibition combines a large-scale installation with collages from the series Cuts.
In her installations, Heidi Sill works with real hair and delicate stainless steel chains that hang from the ceiling into the room like drawn lines. In doing so, she explores questions of memory, identity, and physical traces. Hair is a deeply personal and at the same time culturally coded material that conveys intimacy, vulnerability, and a sense of place. At the same time, the real hair extensions used by the artist are part of a complex global socioeconomic cycle. Donated hair from Hindu temples or the hair of destitute young women from South India form the basis of an extensive value chain, whose burden is borne primarily by female actors.
At Spor Klübü, the work takes its starting point from the landscape of the pointed, rough wall. Barely perceptible irregularities on the wall continue into the room through delicate chains and strands of hair. A network of lines and connections that oscillates between drawing and sculpture.
The collages in the Cuts series also emerge through a process of uncovering. Heidi Sill cuts fragments from fashion, lifestyle, and art magazines and assembles them into multi-layered pictorial spaces. The motifs still carry the aura and glamour of their original contexts, but elude clear localization. They move between an overwriting of standardized desire and its staging.
The Hidden Traces brings together works that deal with the visible and invisible inscriptions of bodies, materials, and social relationships. In doing so, connections are created between individual experience and global economic interconnections, between presence and absence, surface and depth.
Photography: Michael Schultze