Kunstraum Aarau – SWAB Barcelona Art Fair

Kunstraum Aarau

Program

General

Artists

Maksim Klopfstein

Levent Pinarci

Website

Instagram

Kunstraum Aarau (Aarau)

Founded in 1990, Kunstraum Aarau is an independent, artist-run venue dedicated to contemporary art and its interdisciplinary intersections. Located in the heart of Aarau’s old town, it comprises a street-level project space with large windows facing the pedestrian street, offering a visible platform for exhibitions, performances, concerts, and experimental formats. Kunstraum Aarau supports emerging artistic practices and perspectives that challenge established ways of seeing and listening, fostering dialogue, critical exchange, and artistic experimentation beyond commercial and institutional frameworks. Run by a non-profit association of artists and cultural practitioners, Kunstraum Aarau has been an important platform for contemporary art and critical discourse in the region for more than three decades.

Proposal

The duo presentation Solid Void brings together the artistic practices of Maksim Klopfstein and Levent Pınarcı. Both bodies of work move between physical and digital realities, exploring the thresholds between visibility and absence, memory and narration. Through drawing, sculpture, 3D-printed elements, and lithophanies, the artists develop hybrid forms that weave together analogue and digital processes. Their works engage with questions of identity, embodiment, and more-than-human relationships, revealing how technologies, materials, and narratives shape our understanding of presence and transformation

Maksim Klopfstein

Maksim Klopfstein (she/her,*2000, Bern) explores the concepts of liminality, the sublime and abject through her psychoaesthetic image practice.

In her current work cycle called Tender Violences she investigates the unstable boundary between care and violence within medical, psychiatric and social structures. Guided by the question “Where does care end and violence begin?”, the work examines situations in which protection, treatment and harm coexist and become indistinguishable from one another.

Working primarily through graphite drawing, sculptural framing and material-based processes, the artist approaches drawing as a surgical and forensic act.

Graphite penetrates the paper like a medical procedure entering the body or a psychological intervention affecting the mind, while layers of latex, plastic, medical materials and hand-worked surfaces aim to evoke associations with skin, restraint, protection and vulnerability simultaneously. The works move between tenderness and intrusion, precision and fragmentation, intimacy and institutional control.

Drawing from personal experiences with illness, dissociation and psychiatric systems, the work explores how psychological states such as paranoia, emotional distress and perceptual instability can be materialised.

The assimilation of multiple works functions as interconnected fragments within a larger “body-like” psychoaesthetic system of symbolic contamination. Narrative materials, layered systems of references and recurring motifs continuously shift, communicate, contradict and support one another.

Rather than offering clear resolutions, Klopfsteins works insists on complexity, questioning how bodies and psyches are framed, treated, protected and disciplined within contemporary structures of care.

As a female artist with a chronic illness she is confronted with sexist and ableist norms of society on a daily basis, which leave her to work with said experiences and weaving them into her artistic practice. It is an attempt to reclaim and redefine said norms for example through working with motives from psychological horror games or folk tales, as they manage to make distorted perceptions of reality tangible.

Catalogue

Levent Pınarcı

Levent Pınarcı (b. 1989, Aarau, Switzerland) is an artist based in Switzerland whose practice investigates the intersections of technology, language, and identity through an a-disciplinary approach to archiving, artistic research, and material experimentation.

Working across sound design, sculpture, video, and research-based practices, Pınarcı continually reconsiders the conditions and possibilities of the “medium.” Recent projects examine the porous boundaries between private memory and public expression, transforming intimate narratives and archival materials into tactile and digital objects (Botenstoffe 1–5, 2025; The Tongue as a Portal, 2022). Other works address the aesthetics and ethics of computer-generated imagery and cultural appropriation (Augmented Other_ing, with Claude Amsler, published in Freiburger Zeitschrift für Geschlechterstudien, 2022), while engaging with multimodal critiques of cryonic and transhumanist imaginaries of immortality (time becomes meaningless in this context, 2025, Kunsthaus Steffisburg).

Pınarcı’s experimental approach to music and sound has developed across diverse contexts, from theatrical sound design at institutions including Burgtheater Wien and Schauspielhaus Graz to improvisational, drone-based performances, DJ sets, and independent music productions.

Informed by family histories of migration, fragmented heritage, and the social complexities of belonging, Pınarcı’s practice engages with questions of memory, identity, and transformation. These threads shape the political and emotional dimensions of their work, where technological, material, and embodied forms become sites for negotiating experiences of presence, absence, and connection.

Catalogue