{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "bskyPostRef": {
    "cid": "bafyreiedtsll6xqumndqufxvlzoaiclnv57idbve2ggv5na7ie63xhkd6m",
    "uri": "at://did:plc:dnzwezwxcf5nv4edxk4gyysb/app.bsky.feed.post/3mnjavcjshsh2"
  },
  "coverImage": {
    "$type": "blob",
    "ref": {
      "$link": "bafkreib5sphonc2sreni3vjbtjl6oqo22mzdul3fponrfsrorjxaydyuva"
    },
    "mimeType": "image/webp",
    "size": 326814
  },
  "description": "NAK Aachen presents Elen Braga's first institutional solo exhibition: textile installations on migration, xenophobia, and identity. Through 26 July 2026.",
  "path": "/elen-braga-neuer-aachener-kunstverein-nak-aachen/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-05T04:01:12.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.catapult-platform.art",
  "tags": [
    "NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein",
    "Elen Braga",
    "Maurice Funken",
    "Wouters Gallery, Brussels",
    "Instagram Elen Braga",
    "NAK Instagram",
    "Maurice Funken Instagram",
    "Wouters Gallery Brussels",
    "catapult.art",
    "Submit your work →",
    "Artist in Focus",
    "Read More",
    "Exhibition",
    "Interview"
  ],
  "textContent": "## NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein Presents Ich bin wie du in Aachen\n\nNAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein presents  _Ich bin wie du_ , the first institutional solo exhibition by Elen Braga, curated by Maurice Funken, through 26 July 2026.\n\n****Elen Braga,**** __Ich bin wie du__ , 2026;  __Drone__ , 2026;  __Ode to Antônio Gonçalves Dias__ , 2026. Installation view, Ich bin wie du, ****NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen**** , 2026. Courtesy the artist and Wouters Gallery, Brussels. Photo: Simon Vogel.****Elen Braga,**** __Original blue__ , 2026. Installation view, Ich bin wie du, ****NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen,**** 2026. Courtesy the artist and Wouters Gallery, Brussels. Photo: Simon Vogel.\n\nThe show begins with a head. Elen Braga's own, oversized, with fabric arms, installed in the NAK foyer before visitors have chosen a direction.\n\n _Bababuá_ greets you before the exhibition has officially started. That placement carries weight, arrival, self-projection, the body announced before anything else has been said.\n\n* * *\n\n**Ich bin wie du**\n\n**Artist:**\nElen Braga\n\n**Exhibition:**\nIch bin wie du\n\n**Venue:**\n\nNAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein\n\n\n**City:**\nAachen, Germany\n\n**Dates:**\n3 May 2026 – 26 July 2026\n\n**Curator:**\nMaurice Funken\n\n**Photography:**\nSimon Vogel\n\n**Image Courtesy:**\nCourtesy the artist and Wouters Gallery, Brussels\n\n* * *\n\nThe title borrows from a 1976 disco song by German singer Marianne Rosenberg. A song about recognition, about finding the self in another.\n\n****Elen Braga**** ,  __One to zen__ , 2026;  __Amanhã será outro dia (Tomorrow will be another day)__ , 2026;  __Papagaio americano (American parrot)__ , 2026. Installation view, Ich bin wie du, NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, 2026. Courtesy the artist and Wouters Gallery, Brussels. Photo: Simon Vogel.\n\nBraga takes that premise and runs it through everything that makes equality complicated, such as migration, xenophobia, political violence, the daily reality of learning a foreign language by memorizing its numbers, until the chorus sounds more like a demand than a comfort.\n\n> The claim of sameness is not the same as equality. Braga builds that gap into the structure of the exhibition, room by room, until the walls themselves say otherwise.\n\nThe**NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein** is a kunstverein in the traditional sense: a membership-based institution with a history of supporting ambitious, risk-taking work.\n\nFor Braga, a Brazilian artist based in Antwerp, showing for the first time in a German institutional solo, the venue is not incidental. Germany, its language, its history, its political present, becomes material in this exhibition. Not backdrop.\n\n****Elen Braga,**** __Amanhã será outro dia (Tomorrow will be another day)__ , 2026, detail. Ich bin wie du, NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, 2026. Courtesy the artist and Wouters Gallery, Brussels. Photo: Simon Vogel.\n\nThe route through the first floor is structured like a life history in nonlinear order.  _My Grandmother and 50 Years in 5_ is a hand-tufted textile sculpture of a woman cooking over an open fire, a chicken in hand.\n\n****Elen Braga**** ,  __My grandmother and 50 years in 5__ , 2026. Installation view, Ich bin wie du,****NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen,**** 2026. Courtesy the artist and ****Wouters Gallery,**** Brussels. Photo: Simon Vogel.\n\nA radio plays the voice of former Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek promising a better Brazil. The piece is at once intimate and historical, the domestic detail impossible to separate from the political noise beneath it.\n\n****Elen Braga**** ,  __Sunday with my family__ , 2026;  __At the Right Hand__ , 2026;  __One to zen__ , 2026;  __Original blue__ , 2026. Installation view, Ich bin wie du, ****NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen**** , 2026. Courtesy the artist and Wouters Gallery, Brussels. Photo: Simon Vogel.****Elen Braga**** ,  __Sunday with my family__ , 2026. Installation view, Ich bin wie du, ****NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen,**** 2026. Courtesy the artist and Wouters Gallery, Brussels. Photo: Simon Vogel.\n\nThe six-meter textile  _Amanhã será outro dia (Tomorrow will be another day)_ dominates the first exhibition space. It is dense in religious symbolism, Brazilian presidential failures, COVID graves, the 2014 World Cup final between Germany and Brazil. And a duck.\n\nLoosely arranged text elements do not explain the images, they compete with them. Braga has said she must know how to say something before she can identify what it is. The textile works this way, it is a form before it is a thesis.\n\n****Elen Braga**** ,  __One to zen__ , 2026. Installation view, Ich bin wie du, ****NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, 2026****. Courtesy the artist and Wouters Gallery, Brussels. Photo: Simon Vogel.\n\n_One to zen_ is a staircase-like structure that appears to teach the first ten German numbers. Look closer and the steps double as catchphrases: \"ICE,\" \"FEAR,\" \"NOISE.\" At the top sits a decapitated textile self-portrait of the artist.\n\n****Elen Braga**** ,  __At the Right Hand__ , 2026;  __No Re-Entry__ , 2026. Installation view, Ich bin wie du, NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, 2026. Courtesy the artist and Wouters Gallery, Brussels. Photo: Simon Vogel.\n\nNearby, a suitcase rests under a sign reading  _No Re-Entry_. The spaceship in  _Original blue_ stands ready, the hopeful exit for all aliens, all strangers, all foreigners. The sequence reads as autobiography and as political map at once.\n\nThe exhibition opened in May 2026, when the rightward political shift Braga references is not historical lesson but running current.\n\nThe soldiers in gray uniforms who stare blankly at the large red-white-black tapestry  _Winter in Germany_ are uniformed and conformist by design.\n\n****Elen Braga,**** __Winter in Germany__ , 2026;  __Sir, Nein, Sir!__ , 2026;  __Tão quente que era que pouco mais era morte (série \"Os 12 trabalhos\")__ , 2015;  __The ego__ , 2026. Installation view, Ich bin wie du, ****NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen**** , 2026. Courtesy the artist and Wouters Gallery, Brussels. Photo: Simon Vogel.****Elen Braga**** ,  __Sunday with my family__ , 2026;  __At the Right Hand__ , 2026;  __One to zen__ , 2026;  __Original blue__ , 2026. Installation view, Ich bin wie du, ****NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein**** , Aachen, 2026. Courtesy the artist and Wouters Gallery, Brussels. Photo: Simon Vogel.****Elen Braga**** ,  __The goldsmith with red beak__ , 2026;  __The ego__ , 2026;  __Burn Char Roast__ , 2026;  __Ode to Antônio Gonçalves Dias__ , 2026. Installation view, Ich bin wie du, ****NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen**** , 2026. Courtesy the artist and ****Wouters Gallery, Brussels.**** Photo: Simon Vogel.****Elen Braga,**** __Burn Char Roast__ , 2026;  __Hungry Pigeons #3, #4, #5__ , 2026. Installation view, Ich bin wie du, ****NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein**** , Aachen, 2026. Courtesy the artist and Wouters Gallery, Brussels. Photo: Simon Vogel.\n\nThe rotating textile kebab skewers of  _Burn Char Roast_ carry the double weight of ironic affection and xenophobic reality. The titular wall piece in the stairwell includes the phrase \"OFF WITH THEIR HEADS\" and, despite the song it borrows, a correction: \"NICHT WIE DU,\" not like you. The reversal is placed inside the work's own body.\n\nThe video  _Nevermore_ shows Braga in Death Valley, in a foreign land, struggling against landscape and light. It is black-and-white, large-format, and poetic in the way physical endurance can be poetic, when effort is the only legible argument.\n\n****Elen Braga,**** __Nevermore__ , 2026;  __Sir, Nein, Sir!__ , 2026;  __Tão quente que era que pouco mais era morte (série \"Os 12 trabalhos\")__ , 2015;  __The ego__ , 2026. Installation view, Ich bin wie du, NAK ****Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen,**** 2026. Courtesy the artist and Wouters Gallery, Brussels. Photo: Simon Vogel.\n\nOne leaves the exhibition having moved through a grandmother’s fire, a Brazilian soap opera, gray soldiers, rotating meat skewers, and the artist’s own severed head at the top of a staircase.\n\nThe works do not ask for sympathy. They ask you to count to ten in a language you do not speak, and notice what the numbers actually say. By the end,  _Ich bin wie du_ is no longer a promise of sameness, but a test of who is allowed to be counted as equal.\n\nInstagram Elen Braga\nNAK Instagram \nMaurice Funken Instagram\nWouters Gallery Brussels\n\n**About Catapult Contemporary - Art Platform Submission**\n\nThis is a exhibition review published by Catapult — an independent editorial platform for contemporary art, based in Vienna. We publish exhibition reviews, artist features, interviews, and critical context, with a focus on emerging and mid-career practices from Europe and beyond.\ncatapult.art\n\nWant to be featured? Submit your work →\n\n* * *\n\nArtist in Focus\n\n## Can Thread Remember the Body? Artist Spotlight Yali Romagoza\n\nRead More\n\nExhibition\n\n## Villa Bernasconi: Stitches – A Haunted House and Other Ghost Stories\n\nRead More\n\nInterview\n\n## Hugo Brazão: Sculpting Escapism in a World of Fabric, Fiction, and Form\n\nRead More",
  "title": "A Body That Keeps Arriving in Countries Where It Does Not Speak the Language",
  "updatedAt": "2026-06-05T04:01:11.980Z"
}