Barbara Kapusta (b. 1983) currently lives and works in Vienna. A central recurring element in her practice is the conjunction of the body with materiality and speech. Her works are articulations of situated bodies, partial perspectives and queer agency as they question the imperial gesture of universality and binary structuring. She was awarded the Otto Mauer Prize in 2020. Recent exhibitions include Enjoy, museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien; Europa Antike Zukunft, Halle für Kunst Steiermark, Graz; The Leaking Bodies Series, Gianni Manhattan, Vienna; Hypersurface, ACF London; Dan- gerous Bodies, Kunstraum London; Hysterical Mining, Kunsthalle Wien; We Make the Place by Playing, VIS, Hamburg; Empathic Creatures, Ashley Berlin; The Pro- mise of Total Automation, Kunsthalle Wien.

The Leaking Bodies Series, 2020
Kapusta’s video installation ‘The Leaking Bodies’ seeks to describe the effects of environmental, social and emotional stress, the increasing toxicity of landscapes, political instability, and how these relations work in, and on our bodies. ‘The Leaking Bodies’ traces the connection between capital, migration, toxicity, activism, health, and identity through the routes of fluids, linking acts such as the privatisation of drinking water and the forestation of crude oil streams. The installation weaves stories about leaking pipelines, contamination of water, and terrain, ecological protest, identity, as well as the permeability of our bodies and borders. For Kapusta, skin assumes the position of a zone of transition, a membrane, acting simultaneously permeable and a barrier. A fertile zone where transformations, new compositions and multiplications occur, while at the same time conten- ding with a constant and real threat of pollution, extinc- tion and poisoning, all deriving from the vicious loop of capitalism, consumerism, and our own actions within it.