Artist: Janaina Tschäpe (German-Brazilian, born 1973)
Title: Juju 2 (The Sea and the Mountain)
Date: 2004
Medium: Dye destruction print (Cibachrome / silver dye bleach print)
Dimensions: 42 × 52 × 2 in. (framed)
Credit: Gift of Giuseppe Ciardi through Museums Exchange, 2026, Image copyright of the artist.

When viewers first encounter Juju 2 (The Sea and the Mountain), they are often unsure exactly what they are seeing. Standing atop a lush hillside in Brazil, a solitary figure turns away from us. Draped in translucent fabric and transformed by an organic sculptural form made from water-filled balloons, the body appears at once human, botanical, and entirely unfamiliar. That sense of uncertainty is precisely what interests artist Janaina Tschäpe.

Born in Munich and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, Tschäpe has spent her career creating photographs that blur the boundaries between performance, sculpture, mythology, and the natural world. Her photographs don’t document reality; they preserve carefully staged performances in which she transforms herself into imagined beings that seem to exist somewhere between plant, animal, and human. The resulting images pull viewers into landscapes where transformation feels possible and the line between one kind of body and another goes slack.¹

Created in 2004, Juju 2 (The Sea and the Mountain) depicts a figure partially veiled in a thin gauzy garment, clothed in a white leotard and pressed against fourteen visible egg-like forms constructed from water-filled balloons. These smaller shapes connect to a large biomorphic mass that hangs from the figure’s upper body and nearly touches the grassy hillside beneath her feet. Behind her stretches the mountainous Bocaina region of Brazil, shrouded in mist. Facing away from the viewer, the figure appears absorbed in a private encounter with the landscape, suggesting what curator Germano Celant described as “a transition away from a watery world… and a rebirth connected to a new world and a new body.”²

The photograph belongs to a pivotal moment in Tschäpe’s career. Originally trained as a painter, she shifted toward performance, photography, and video while in graduate school, discovering that these collaborative media created an emotional distance from her subject that painting did not. “Photography and video often involve other people,” she has said. “You see things in a more conceptual way, detached from emotion. I benefited from this distance.”³

Although the photographs are what remain, the performances themselves were central to Tschäpe’s practice. She created wearable sculptures from everyday materials, including water-filled balloons attached directly to her body, and performed within the landscape before photographing the results. She deliberately avoided digital manipulation, allowing the handmade quality of these strange new bodies to remain visible. “I just glued them on my back,” she recalled. “I wasn’t concerned if the materiality revealed itself.”⁴

Her imaginary creatures draw on a wide range of influences. Growing up between Germany and Brazil, Tschäpe absorbed German Romanticism alongside the spiritual traditions of Brazil, particularly Afro-Brazilian beliefs and Candomblé practices. She has also cited artists including Marina Abramović, Rebecca Horn, Lygia Clark, Maya Deren, and Bas Jan Ader as formative influences. Instead of illustrating existing mythology, Tschäpe invents new myths, beings that seem to belong simultaneously to memory, ecology, folklore, and science fiction.⁵

One recurring influence is the figure of the mermaid. Tschäpe has described her fascination with “the idea generated around woman and the discovery of new lands, travels by sea, the unknown.” For her, the mermaid represents unexplored territory and the possibility of transformation, which surface throughout The Sea and the Mountain series. Even though the figure in Juju 2 stands on land, the work retains this sense of emergence, as though a new species has arrived at the edge of an unfamiliar world.⁶

Juju 2 (The Sea and the Mountain) strengthens The Block Museum’s collection of contemporary photography while expanding its representation of artists whose work explores ecology, performance, and the body through interdisciplinary practice. It also enters into conversation with other works in the collection that imagine transformations of the human form, from Louise Bourgeois’s Femme Maison to photographs by Zhang Huan, Derrick Woods-Morrow, Anna Gaskell, Laurie Simmons, and David Teplica. These artists use the camera not to record the world as it is but to imagine what else the body, and photography itself, might become.

Notes

1. Janaina Tschäpe et al., Chimera (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2008); Joachim Pissarro and Enrique Juncosa, Janaina Tschäpe (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2025).
2. Germano Celant and Luisa Duarte, Janaina Tschäpe (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2018), 21.
3. Francesco Clemente, “Interview: Janaina Tschäpe by Francesco Clemente,” BOMB Magazine, March 13, 2019.
4. Rachael Thomas, interview with Janaina Tschäpe, quoted in Janaina Tschäpe (Hatje Cantz, 2025), 104.
5. Joachim Pissarro and Enrique Juncosa, Janaina Tschäpe (Hatje Cantz, 2025); Andrea Green, Melantropics (St. Louis: Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2006).
6. Celso Fioravante et al., Virgin Territory: Women, Gender, and History in Contemporary Brazilian Art (Washington, DC: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 2001), 113; Joachim Pissarro, Janaina Tschäpe (Hatje Cantz, 2025).

–Text based on acquisition research by Llewyn Blossfeld, Curatorial Associate