Sonja Ahlers
Make Art Like Me

[En anglais]

A carefully arranged chaos of shells, cassette tapes, collages, gemstones, ribbons, zines, and one framed decades-old heart-shaped ketchup chip: the exhibition Make Art Like Me at Deluge Contemporary Art featured thirty years of girlish artefacts that comprise Sonja Ahlers’s oeuvre. Despite its maximalism, the exhibition was an intimate display positioned as a compass for navigating a world of objects and images that conspires to perpetuate an absurd notion of woman-ness. Ahlers asserts that women are various and welcomes you into her universe of multitudes. Her practice is defined by a relentless form of autobiography through self-chronicling. She collects the ephemera of everyday life, including handwritten letters, magazine cut-outs, and spent lipstick tubes. This perennial impulse to preserve what is both infinite and quotidian was evidenced in the exhibitionmost vividly by a giant ball of aluminum foil placed lovingly on a plinth.

Overstuffed binders were set out in the centre of the gallery. Visitors found the excesses of Ahlers’s personal archive by thumbing through their plastic-sheet-protected pages. As Ahlers once explained, “The archive is proof that I exist.” This cyclical and reifying conversation between her and her audience gives her practice an ouroboros quality. Her selves are positioned within a complex matrix of girlhood, womanhood, sisterhood, and motherhood. While it’s possible to read Ahlers, now fifty-four, as someone overly occupied with her youth, it is rather that her work is a meditation on the stages of selfhood, suggesting that they’re always unfolding and refolding concurrently.