Elen Braga – Ich bin wie du

Opening: May 2, 2026, 7 pm
Duration: May 3 – July 26, 2026

Greeting: Johanna Roderburg (Board NAK)
Introduction: Maurice Funken (Director NAK)

„Before I was an artist, I was a gospel singer. I sang in evangelical churches (…). Inaddition to singing, I also preached or, as it was said, I ‘delivered the word.’ (…) So I learned that if I wanted to speak well, I had to know how to tell stories, but not give everything away. We connected the stories to ourselves, because we liked to hear about ourselves. Maybe not everything was true, but there was a truth to be told (here and everywhere).” – Elen Braga[1]

NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein is pleased to present Ich bin wie du, the first institutional solo exhibition by Brazilian artist Elen Braga. On the occasion of the opening on May 2, 2026, there will be two musical performances by the artist together with STIEGLITZ and William Lutgens. The evening’s additional musical program will be hosted by pilot.radio.fm.

As a multidisciplinary visual artist, Braga works across installation, sculpture, performance, and public space. Her often large-scale installations frequently incorporate performative elements, usually involving the use of her own image. She consciously embraces the challenge of working with new materials and techniques, including textile, ceramics, and metal. In her artistic practice, she engages with themes such as strength, resilience, and identity, often through self-imposed tasks and intensive, labor-driven processes. Braga draws on mythological narratives to explore how they persist in contemporary behaviors and belief systems. Her works often respond to the specific contexts of their presentation sites, while simultaneously playing with the paradoxes of materiality and experimenting with materials beyond their everyday use.

In the foyer of the NAK, visitors are immediately greeted by Elen Braga herself—in the form of an oversized head with fabric arms, the work Bababuá. On the way to the first exhibition room, one encounters a hand-tufted textile sculpture of the artist’s grandmother, cooking over an open fire, still holding the headless body of a chicken. Childhood memories of the artist emerge, accompanied in the background by the constant static of a radio broadcasting the voice of former Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek, dreaming of a better Brazil.

In the first exhibition space, visitors’ attention is immediately drawn to a six-meter-wide wall work by the artist: colorful, figurative, and interspersed with loosely arranged text elements, disrupted by mythological narratives and symbolism. The large-scale textile piece combines various scenes into a dense whole: religious and political motifs meet desert landscapes, graves, and the 2014 World Cup final between Germany and Brazil. And a duck. “Before I can clearly identify the content of what I want to say, I must know how to say it. I use language, but I cannot easily identify this concept with words alone,”[2] says the artist, who juxtaposes text and image in her works, inviting viewers to decode them. The result is an entanglement of utopia and dystopia—a fiction (or perhaps history?) that renders the wishes and dreams of migrants visible as reality, while simultaneously raising the question of what identity and home actually mean:

„The future was such a distant thing, that it was possible form e to construct the most beautiful narratives. Today I have the feeling that when I think about the future, it has already passed. I am the future and I am writing about the past.“[3]

By incorporating her own history and chronology into her work, making the private public, Braga creates a non-linear path through the exhibition space, allowing different scenarios to intersect across individual works. The parents’ living room with a Brazilian soap opera and life-sized sculptural replicas of her own family, or the Periquito, a yellow-green parakeet perched on a blue-and-white starred floor lamp, initially appear positively charged in their colorfulness, idealizing the past—as childhood often is. Yet what is shown also reflects the artist’s own life journey, which ultimately led her from Brazil to Belgium. Or now to Germany. Or perhaps into space? The Spaceship stands ready—a hopeful escape for all aliens, all strangers, all foreigners.

However, works such as a suitcase placed beneath a sign reading “No Re-Entry,” or a staircase rising toward the ceiling marked with keywords like “ICE,” “FEAR,” and “NOISE,” point to the challenges facing global society, increasingly threatened by a rightward political shift and the accompanying rise in xenophobia worldwide. Braga explicitly references the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the work that gives the exhibition its title, Ich bin wie du, installed in the stairwell of the Kunstverein, questions U.S. politics with the phrase “OFF WITH THEIR HEADS.” Because it is not only chickens that lose their heads in the Kunstverein: at the top of the stairs, one encounters a textile sculpture of a decapitated self-portrait of the artist.

Regarding the gradual thematic shift within the exhibition, Braga explains: „The title is Ich bin wie du. It is a reference to a 1976 song by the German singer Marianne Rosenberg. The song is about recognition between two people, a sense of equality that transcends differences. In my work for NAK, however, the song takes on a more critical meaning. It raises questions about empathy, alienation, and the difficulty of forming authentic relationships in a world shaped by inequality, migration, and cultural hybridity.” The work Ich bin wie du also marks Braga’s engagement with Germany. Not only the iconic disco hit referenced in the title—played over a radio on the upper floor—can be recognized as a German motif, but also references to Otto Dix, arms exports, and the depicted half-timbered houses, which, however, negate equality with the phrase “NOT LIKE YOU.”

On the upper floor, Braga’s engagement with Germany becomes particularly evident. Alongside a federal eagle on a golden background, large fabric dolls dressed in gray military uniforms welcome visitors. With empty gazes, the soldiers stare at a large red-white-black tapestry—like a historical mirror, doubling back on German history as a warning that nationalism and right-wing populism remain present despite a strong culture of remembrance.

The exhibition is rounded out by video works by the artist, which focus on her performative practice and are conceptually aligned with I Am Like You.

 

Elen Braga (*1984 in Maranhão, Brazil) completed her postgraduate studies at a.pass (Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies) in Brussels in 2018 and undertook residencies at AIR Antwerp (now MORPHO) (2016), ISELP (2020), and Buitenplaats Brienenoord (Rotterdam, 2021). Her work has been shown at the Cerveira Biennale (PT), Frac des Pays de la Loire (FR), WIELS (Brussels, BE), KIOSK (Ghent, BE), NICC Vitrine, ISELP, CC Strombeek, and KANAL-Centre Pompidou (Brussels, BE). In 2022, she was selected to create a permanent installation for the renovated Kaaitheater, which opened in 2025. She also collaborated with choreographer Michiel Vandevelde on a textile scenography for the dance performance Le Sacre du Printemps, which premiered in 2025 at Theater Neumarkt in Zurich. Braga lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium.

Kindly supported by: