Review by Elâ Atakan

Margret Wibmer
12 March  – 12 June
The Hox Gallery / The Hoxton, Lloyd
Oostelijke Handelskade 34,
1019 BN Amsterdam

An Elegant Ritual
On Margret Wibmer’s Work

Margret Wibmer’s photographs are presented from March 12 to June 12 at The Hoxton, Lloyd Amsterdam. Originally constructed in the early twentieth century, the building has served different functions over time among them a refuge for Jewish migrants during World War II, later a detention center and prison, before eventually becoming a site for artistic production and hospitality. Although today it functions as a carefully designed hotel, traces of these layered histories remain present within its corridors and transitional spaces. Installed throughout these passageways, Wibmer’s photographs enter dialogue with the building’s atmosphere: suspended bodies, obsolete objects, cables, garments, and anonymous interiors echo the slight unease and instability still embedded within the architecture itself.

Textile has occupied a central role in Wibmer’s practice since childhood. Her mother was a tailor, and the artist grew up surrounded by fabrics, sewing machines, second-hand garments, and the repetitive gestures of cutting, stitching, ironing, and fitting clothing onto bodies. The sewing room became both a domestic and performative environment. Her mother produced clothes for the family while also teaching sewing to women from nearby villages. Fabrics bought across the Italian border and second-hand garments left behind by tourists staying in the family home accumulated in closets and drawers in the basement. Long before studying art, Wibmer developed an intimate understanding of textile. As she recalls: “I remember the gestures that are involved in making the clothing such as the handling of the fabric, the threading of the needle and the safe stitching before sewing the pieces together on the machine, the ironing of the seams etc. very clearly, because I learned from watching her. Also, I remember the sound of the sewing machine and the fitting of the clothing which to me is a performance.”*

Many of Wibmer’s photographs function almost as fragments extracted from performances. The garments she uses sometimes cling to the body like a second skin, while others appear as pieces she has sewn herself or sourced from second-hand markets in Paris, Japan, or New York. Objects within the compositions are carefully positioned: old cables, outdated domestic devices, industrial remnants, and machines that once belonged to postwar everyday life. These materials do not function as props but as active presences carrying historical and emotional weight.

Faces are frequently obscured or partially hidden in these photographs. Rather than emphasizing individual identity, the artist explains that the face immediately produces assumptions about age and cultural background. This approach extends directly into Salon d’Amour, an ongoing participatory performance project first developed in 2023 in Austria and later presented in Amsterdam and Japan. The work involves handmade masks produced from collected textiles, including ballroom gowns found in Parisian second-hand stores, Japanese family fabrics inherited from her daughter’s great-grandmother, crinoline, hair, and fragments reused from earlier works. The masks are continually modified depending on location and context. As Wibmer notes, “They function as a central medium within the performance, together with the manuscript, a collection of love letters, poems and excerpts from novels, and the soundscape.”*

During Salon d’Amour, participants read aloud from manuscripts composed of love letters, poems, and political texts while facing masked participants seated opposite them. The performances incorporate multiple languages and writers, among them James Baldwin, Ingeborg Bachmann, Ursula K. Le Guin, Franz Kafka, Banana Yoshimoto, and Mohamedou Ould Slahi. The manuscripts change from one edition to another, responding to shifting political and cultural contexts. A publication produced with PEACH Wien after the Austrian edition in 2023 further expanded the project through additional texts and correspondence.

Margret Wibmer, The Ride, 2012, Archival pigment print on Fine Art photo paper mounted on Dibond. 

The artist’s sensitivity toward objects and interiors was also shaped by her years in Brooklyn during the 1980s. In 1984 she moved into Metropolitan Exchange on Flatbush Avenue, a former industrial bank building transformed by its owner, Al Attara, into a vast storage and studio complex. Machinery, tools, collected industrial remnants, and temporary artist communities occupied the building’s seven floors. Wibmer lived and worked there for years alongside musicians, filmmakers, writers, and craftspeople. These industrial interiors filled with collected objects and unstable uses continue to resonate throughout her photographs and installations.

This relationship between bodies, objects, and constructed environments gradually led Wibmer toward ritual-based performances. Questions surrounding choreography and collective participation emerge most explicitly in Absence of the Tea Master, developed with curator and artist Akane Nakamori and filmed at the Nishida Kitaro Museum of Philosophy in Japan. The project examines Japanese tea ceremony traditions through questions of gender and ritual. Historically associated with male exclusivity, the tea ceremony becomes here a site of reinterpretation. The project was developed partly in relation to Fuyuko Kobori, who became the first female tea master within the Kobori Enshu lineage in 2025. Rather than reproducing a traditional ceremony, Wibmer constructed what she describes as “a new ritual.” A dancer wearing garments developed with students from a fashion school in Kanazawa moved through Tadao Ando’s circular architectural space carrying transparent glass tea bowls instead of traditional ceramic vessels. The participants, dressed in identical lightweight garments resembling a hybrid between monk robes and kimonos, entered a choreographed environment in which textile, architecture, movement, and ritual became inseparable.

Margret Wibmer and Akane Nakamori, Absence of the Tea Master, 2013. Participative performance and video work, Ishikawa Nishida Kitaro Museum of Philosophy, Japan.
Photo: Margret Wibmer

The project was later restaged in Düsseldorf at Weltkunstzimmer, a former bread factory, where the tea ceremony was recontextualized within an industrial environment. By shifting the work from Japan to Germany, Wibmer exposed how ritual changes meaning once removed from its original cultural and architectural context.

By relocating rituals, garments, and bodies across different architectural and cultural settings, Wibmer continuously destabilizes fixed meanings and systems of representation. Her photographs do not document performances in a conventional sense; rather, they capture moments in which bodies and textiles enter into fragile choreographies. Garments, often sourced from second-hand markets or composed of delicate inherited fabrics, gradually detach from their original cultural functions. They acquire their own physical language, shaping unfamiliar silhouettes and fragile bodily forms. Across Wibmer’s practice, textile becomes not simply a material but a medium through which ritual continues to circulate between bodies and spaces.

Margret Wibmer, Infinite Play #6, 2017. Archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Baryta photo paper, 47 x 64 cm

*Interview with Margret Wibmer, 10 April 2026

Photo credit: Margret Wibmer, Relay, 2000. Stills from the eponymous video (Michael #3, Alva #7, Malaya #6). Archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Baryta photo paper, 58 × 40 cm and 44 × 40 cm