A Tragical Romance at Wonnerth Dejaco

Artists: Leah Clements, Rebecca Jagoe, Korallia Stergides, Marianne Vlaschits

Exhibition title: A Tragical Romance

Curated by: Mariana Lemos

Venue: Wonnerth Dejaco, Vienna, Austria

Date: September 13 – October 19, 2024

Photography: ©Rosie Taylor, images courtesy of the artists and Wonnerth Dejaco, Vienna

A Tragical Romance emerges from the gutted remnants of stories long buried, their wounds unhealed and unspoken. The works of Leah Clements, Rebecca Jagoe, Marianne Vlaschits, and Korallia Stergides create a landscape where bodies become myths, personal archives, and sites of transformation. Here, the aged word “tragical” recalls something feverish and expansive, where love and loss drift through centuries, their resonance never entirely fading. Time does not march forward but spills, seeps, and loops back into itself—waves of delay and return, where survival is not about endurance but dissolution, where transformation is inextricable from breakdown. In this liquid world, bodies soften, boundaries blur. Skin becomes porous, seeping, dissolving into something other, something not-quite-human. The artists take us into a space where the body, untethered, floats on a tide of time. Time made slow, sick, stretched and weird.

Leah Clements’ photographs unfold like dreams in water—nocturnal, shimmering. Light fractures on bathwater, as if other worlds were struggling to break through the surface. Bodies are only faint suggestions—vaginal, cavernous—never fully present, always dissolving into reflections, ripples, something not quite graspable. Her images are not landscapes to be entered but thresholds—portals to somewhere not yet known, created by the insomnia-riddled mind somewhere between seduction and fear.

Across this threshold, Marianne Vlaschits’ paintings pulse with cosmic resonance—bodies turned celestial, stars turned flesh. Portal opens like a throat, a galactical vast darkness or a wide-open mouth. What is alien becomes human; what is human becomes something larger, planetary. In the stuttering stars of Glitch Music 2.0, neutron bodies orbit toward inevitable collision, bound by forces they cannot escape. Their slow collapse becomes a romance—creation and destruction spiralling together in an embrace, echoing the tender but violent motion of our own collapsing world.

In Rebecca Jagoe’s work, the body becomes a leaky vessel—soft, wet, grotesque, consumed by desire. Scrofula I and Scrofula II speak of illness, of the strange and unsettling ways we romanticise frailty, and fetishize sickness. The consumptive body of the Victorians once eroticized in its fragility, now returns as something both mourned and celebrated. In Jagoe’s work, piss, blood, tears, and sweat are not markers of weakness but of transcendence, a surrender to the body’s inevitable meltdown. Garments hang ghost-like, emptied of their wearers or opened up wide, as though transformed into the stratosphere by deep time.

Korallia Stergides’ bright yellow medicine stains everything it touches with the mark of grief. It moves between bodies and artworks like a sunbeam pacing the time across the room. In Low Roaming Cloud, this liquid—shared between herself and her dog as a child—leaks into the text and drawings of Jagoe’s Of Thyrst, where they share a language that itself becomes fluid. Jagoe uses a fervid blend of Middle English and neologisms to layer complex emotions with history and fact. For Stergides memory and metaphor melt together: clouds, dogs, marble floors, all blurring into one another, time slipping through them like water through fingers until they disappear. The body, here, dissolves into a soft and sensorial world where distinctions between human and non-human are no longer fixed.

In with your teeth, Jagoe veers into obsession—romantic, monstrous, erotic. Desire becomes a form of consumption, a hunger to merge with the other, to lose oneself completely in love. But in the depths of longing, we come apart. Letters to Arm, a love letter to a blue plastic prosthetic, pushes desire to its limits, asking us to reckon with what we love and how we love, what we desire and what we consume. These tender obsessions unravel into the inanimate world, obscuring the line between body and object, human and other.

Throughout A Tragical Romance, bodies transform and dissolve—into stars, into stone, into one another. Time thickens, bends, and folds, reshaping itself in the sick body’s slow rhythms. There is no clear delineation, no straightforward narrative—only cycles of creation and destruction, collision and collapse. The tragedy here is not the end; it is the process. To transform is to surrender, to leak, to let go.

As in Vlaschits’ stars, the exhibition itself spins toward dissolution—an inevitable, necessary movement toward becoming something else. What remains in this landscape of soft edges and porous bodies is not strength but the possibility of change. It is through the breaking down, the permeation, and the dissolving that we continue, that we find new forms. In this world, love and loss are not separate; they are folded into the body, the earth, the stars—forever blurring, forever becoming.

“I am not one and simple, but complex and many. I can feel in myself innumerable forces—like a cloud full of rain; like a tree whose boughs have broken with the weight of their fruit.”

– The Waves, Virginia Woolf

>Leah Clements, An Eclipse Under The Skin (audio file)

>Leah Clements, An Eclipse Under The Skin (transcript)

>Leah Clements, Inhale Lumen, Exhale Lux (audio file)

>Leah Clements, Inhale Lumen, Exhale Lux (transcript)

>Leah Clements, Subsolar (audio file)

>Leah Clements, Subsolar (transcript)

>Rebecca Jagoe, with your teeth (audio file)

>Rebecca Jagoe, with your teeth (transcript)

>Rebecca Jagoe, Of Thyrst (visual essay)

>Korallia Stergides, Low Roaming Cloud (audio file)

>Korallia Stergides, Low Roaming Cloud (text)