In 2024, the Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig (MdbK) launched the facade project with Cihan Çakmak’s series *Tenseness*. This was followed in 2025 by Katharina Schreiter’s series *Membran*. The project enters its third edition in 2026 with *Ode to Eris* by Roxana Rios.
Image Above: Herrenbildnis, Sarafina, Detail Eingang Böttchergäßchen
In this series commissioned by the MdbK, Roxana Rios (*1994) engages with selected works from the permanent collection through photographic-performative reinterpretations. Rios’s artistic practice is characterized by a critical examination of historically established narratives, particularly the connections between the production of images and knowledge. Ultimately, the focus is on the question of how certain visual patterns in art history—such as gender stereotypes—have persisted and become entrenched to this day. Roxana Rios views the body as a “construct, material, and representative within social orders.”
The series *Ode to Eris* is presented in the form of three large-format banners on the façade of the MdbK, as well as several photographic installations featuring six motifs in the permanent exhibition on the first and second floors, which is free to the public. Drawing on a core interest in questions of physicality, Roxana Rios has examined the permanent exhibition with regard to historical representations of status and gender. In Ode to Eris, RR draws on selected works to reflect on the embodiments depicted in them, as well as their contextual backgrounds and connections. How do ideas, roles, power relations, or narratives become visible in the image? How is the work embedded in cultural, historical, and social contexts? What meanings and symbols does it convey, and how can these be linked to contemporary discourses?
Roxana Rios (RR) studied photography under Heidi Specker at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig (HGB) and under Juergen Teller and Katja Eydel at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg. She then went on to study performing arts under Isabel Lewis at the HGB. Since then, Rios’s work has been exhibited at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, FOTOHOF in Salzburg, the Fotomuseum Winterthur, and the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. Roxana Rios received the 2024 Scholarship for Contemporary German Photography and was selected as a FUTURES Talent by the Hamburg Photography Triennial in 2025. RR lives and works in Leipzig.
The series translates historically evolved forms of physicality into a photographic-performative reinterpretation that combines strategies of reconstruction, subversion, appropriation, and homage.
For example, Max Klinger’s *Cassandra* (1895) is staged as an actively gazing figure, serving as a metaphor for the systematic erasure of non-hegemonic forms of knowledge. In the appropriation of Ferdinand Bol’s Portrait of a Gentleman (1652), the construction of gendered markers is understood as a performance and subverted. Augustin Théodule Ribot’s The Conversation (1876) is read in the context of gossip as an informal, subversive transfer of knowledge and a practice of resistance.
The series thus examines both the museum’s role in shaping history as a site of institutional knowledge production and societal structures based on physical attributes. Eris, the goddess of chaos, is portrayed beyond her one-dimensional image as a troublemaker; she symbolizes resistance against oppressive structures, while her emotions are recognized as legitimate responses to exclusion and oppression.
WHEN?
Exhibitions dates: Sunday, 29. March 2026 to Sunday, 28. March 2027
WHERE?
Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig
Katharinenstraße 10
04109 Leipzig
 launched the facade project with Cihan Çakmak’s series *Tenseness*. This was followed in 2025 by DEEDS. Cultural news, art exhibitions + art events to discover.){kind=link}