Melanie Jame Wolf | Unruly Material

exhibition opening: Friday, May 15, 18.00

performance: May 16, 16.00

15.05–20.06.2026 | Foksal Gallery

curator: Martyna Stołpiec

free entry

The exhibition accompanies the 6th edition of the PERSONA Women’s Art Festival.

The exhibition Unruly Material by Melanie Jame Wolf is first and foremost a formal experiment. The artist explores what gestures such as cutting, stitching, and layering textiles might signify – not only as material operations, but also as acts that construct and destabilise representation. In this sense, Wolf’s practice develops a complex set of correspondences with themes of role-playing, the performative dimensions of violence, unreality, and mechanisms of power. What appears visible is shown to be the result of manipulation. What is material reveals its own instability.

This moment also marks a shift in Wolf’s artistic practice, as she moves from abstraction toward figurative forms. Loosely inspired by The Maids by Jean Genet, the exhibition brings together textile works, video, and performance. Unruly Material The exhibition title - Unruly Material - is a play on words. In English, ‘material’ is both a word for fabric, and also describes matter or phenomena in general – it describes the things we work with, socially or otherwise. ‘Unruly’ here then becomes a pun that refers both to the physical behaviour of fabric – its ungovernable, uncontainable qualities: its capacity to resist fixation, order, or control – and to that behaviour as an allegory for other interactions. What happens when material itself refuses stabilisation? If a piece of fabric can never be hung in exactly the same way twice, can interpretations of social relations ever settle, or are they always already in motion, shaped by shifting conditions of contact and perception?

As with fabric throughout the exhibition, the work is structured through relationality: filling and being filled, surrounding and being surrounded. These are not neutral spatial conditions, but charged forms of contact in which proximity becomes a site where control and surrender are negotiated. How do bodies learn to register force not only as harm, but also as sensation, play, or attention? And where does the distinction between pleasure and violence begin to blur? And to whose benefit? As Hilton Als writes in describing Genet’s play:The Maids “The Maids” is a fantasy – about pain, about playacting, mixed in with a deep understanding of how power works on the powerless.

The exhibition features puppets who invite a closer look at how these dynamics are performed. Emerging from a reflection on the theatrical and performative nature of violence in The Maids, they draw on the British tradition the Punch and Judy puppet theater – a form of popular entertainment historically staged for working-class audiences, in which violence is rendered through humour, spectacle, and moral allegory. In Unruly Material , the puppets, dressed in archetypal French maid uniforms, evoke forms of invisible labour. The handwork of cleaners and tailors (and puppeteers) is deliberately performed to go unnoticed, even as it quietly organises the conditions through which social and material relations take shape. In contrast, Wolf foregrounds the trace of labour through the visible stitch, which becomes a record of time, gesture, and presence.

An urban legend circulating in the Australian television industry suggests that queer puppeteers working on children’s television in the late 1980s and 1990s referred to their puppets as “fist-dollies.” Wolf draws on this story as a speculative narrative that entangles hands, bodies, representation, manipulation, eroticism, and humour. What kinds of subversive or playful readings might emerge from positions of invisibility or perceived insignificance? And how might acts of reinterpretation function not only as forms of resistance, but also as gestures made for one’s own pleasure, even when they remain unseen?

If a fist is like a flower, and a flower like a fist, what kinds of relations are staged between violence and becoming, and what forms of force are at stake in this transformation? What violence is, and whom it serves, remains an open question rather than a fixed proposition.

Following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s attention to attachment, surface, and affect, relationality here is not organised through opposition or hierarchy, but through uneven and unstable proximities. In this sense, the fist operates as a threshold between states – contraction and release, resistance and yielding, autonomy and entanglement. Its ambiguity lies in its capacity to oscillate between aggression and intimacy, control and surrender, containment and exposure.

Rather than locating erotic charge in the image itself, the exhibition situates it within unstable dynamics of boundary-making and boundary-crossing, where intensity circulates through contact, excess, and transformation. At the same time, it gestures toward the ways in which forms of sexual freedom and erotic expression often take shape outside the field of social visibility – in spaces that remain partially obscured, unobserved, or deliberately withdrawn from the gaze. Is it here, in these ongoing negotiations between desire and risk, attraction and refusal, life and its undoing, that one might encounter a force that does not seek resolution, but instead persistently leans toward its own limit?

BIO:

Melanie Jame Wolf is a choreographer, performer, writer, and visual artist. She makes artworks, performances, and texts about power, persona, and the phenomenon she calls 'show business': the persuasive, the deceptive, the staged, the dramatic, the cathartic, and the performed in political, theatrical, and everyday contexts. Using textile, performance, video, song, and writing, her work explores the vulnerability of the live moment and the body as an unruly political riddle. These interests are explored through shape-shifting, stitching, and play with language in surprising and humourous ways. She is interested in how stories get to be told and who gets to tell them.

Spaces that have presented her work include: Kunstmuseum Basel – Gegenwart, KW – Institute of Contemporary Art, Schirn Kunsthalle, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, HAU – Hebbel am Ufer, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, nGbK, The National 2019: New Australian Art biennial, VAEFF - Film Festival NYC, Arts Santa Monica, Schwules Museum, Sophiensaele, Münchner Kammerspiele, Arts House Melbourne, Kasseler Dokfest, KINDL Berlin, Bärenwzinger Berlin, SOPHIE TAPPEINER, Institute of Modern Art Brisbane, and Pori Art Museum.

Melanie Jame was born in Lutruwita/Tasmania and lives and works in Berlin.