In 2026, the Schwalenberg Fellowship was awarded to Leipzig-based artist Linda Marwan. In Schwalenberg, Marwan continued and expanded her project Becoming a Body of Others.
The project playfully engages with the history and concept of the monster, creating sculptures that appear as hybrid beings and refer to the empathetic network of living organisms. Marwan’s works are influenced by gaming as well as the fantasy and horror genres. What may initially appear alien or even frightening becomes equally fascinating. Marwan’s creatures connect humans with animals, as well as landscapes with the bodies that inhabit them. In doing so, they examine corporeality from the perspective of openness and self-surrender. To create them, Marwan primarily employs 3D modelling and 3D printing. In some of these sculptures, the printed and handmade elements ultimately merge into a seemingly homogeneous body.
Acting as manifestations of the fear of one’s own dissolution into the unfamiliar, these critters remind us of the interdependence between everything that is. The appearance of monsters accompanies the world becoming increasingly inhospitable.
For the exhibition, Marwan developed the multipart sculpture Imp Incubator, featuring three imp babies. The imps, goblin-like creatures, emerge from an extracorporeal placenta and are in the process of separating from their umbilical cords. One imp is attempting to bite through its own cord, another lies on a coiled one with its unusually long feet raised in the air, while a third has fallen asleep on the reddish placental parts sucking its thumb.
The placenta, unsettlingly resembling a kneeling body without a head, not only recalls its organic origin but, through its fusion with parts of Gothic armour, also acquires biomechanical features, hinting at the possibility of an artificial origin, as its extracorporeal nature already suggests.
The evident engagement with female corporeality and the birth of another, non-human being stands in the tradition of gynaehorror, a subgenre and analytical concept in horror film that addresses anatomical and biological anxieties surrounding the female body, including experiences and fears relating to pregnancy, childbirth, abortion and the use of reproductive technologies.
Despite addressing these primal human fears, the imps, like all of Marwan’s beings, possess a cute, humorous aspect. Their faces are playful, cheeky and sweet, conforming to the Kindchenschema. In Marwan’s Imp Incubator the emphasis is less on fleeing from fear than on (parental) devotion. Marwan’s sculptures imply the responsibility of accepting the creatures with whom we share this world for what they are, taking responsibility for them, and caring for them.
Alongside the imps, Marwan sculpted a mandrake and a fairy-like creature called Night Sprite. The mandrake, a plant whose roots often resemble human figures, frequently appears in myths and legends and is attributed magical powers, which the artist also invokes through her fantasy worlds inspired by the Middle Ages and transposed into contemporary computer games.
Other creatures emerge with human features and details associated with threat or pain, such as Orca Larva (the Baby) (2025), a whale-like infant with sharp teeth whom the artist nurses at her own breast, or Totfund (2026), which appears as a stranded dead body, a mixture of whale and reptile, with sharp teeth and human-like, claw-shaped fingernails.
The exhibition presents works created during Marwan’s time in Schwalenberg alongside several earlier ensembles and paintings.
