Limited Terms of Grace (2024-2025)

Scope BLN

Lübecker Strasse 43, 10559 Berlin

Opening hours: October 10 - November 7, Fridays and Saturdays 2-6pm or by appointment. Please email Ida Sophia to arrange a time: hello@idasophia.art

To bend over backwards is -

To do ones utmost.

To make every effort.

To go out of ones way.

To bend over backwards is an attempt to do more than one can.

In Limited Terms of Grace, Ida Sophia uses the backbend as a metaphor for examining unsustainable performative behaviour. To prove oneself, to regain love or to show strength, we backbend driven by self-serving desires. As part of her ongoing series Hope Dies Last (2022-), Ida Sophia re-examines the actions she performed as a child in vain hopes of reclaiming her Father’s favouritism. Though secular in intent, her aesthetic draws from Christian material culture, creating works that feel both sacred and subversive, a nod to her upbringing in three denominations and the heightened social situations she experienced within them. Despite knowing she was not religious, Ida performed diligently as if she was. 

During an Artist Residency in Galatina (Italy, 2023), Ida Sophia observed how churches were built not only as acts of piety but crucially, as performative displays of influence. It led her to investigate how she might use these very materials to do the same - to perform and to influence; to become the favourite once again. This insight shaped her process. In using materials directly associated with ‘His’(Our Father’s) church to rebuild one for ‘him’ (Her Father), the outcome became an offering and a plea. The gesture echoes both Renaissance patrons’ efforts and our contemporary acts to secure love and favour through material means. In sumptuous crimson velvet from the prayer kneeler, light reflective aluminium from the votive offerings and crisp white cotton from the altar, the three exhibited sculptures are physically familar and subtly violent monuments to vainly hopeful acts. 

Characteristic of Ida Sophia’s practice, a durational performance completes the installation. Echoing the dimensions of her body, the bent back symbol of the cross coalesces our bodily and emotional contortions performed in futile service of what we vainly want. A body in the backbend position is not easily maintained long term. The legs shake from tension. Vertebrae are over extended and tightly compressed. Blood pressure increases, breakdown is unavoidable. Laid bare, the exerted physicality of an enduring, suffering body questions the observing bodies on how they too perform, make every effort and attempt more than they can - or should. As a performance and installation that began as a hope, it ends as a broken gesture and a critique on both the effect of institutional influence upon personal relationships and vainly hopeful desire for love to remain unchanged.