CERAMIC BRUSSELS

At stand B8, Osnova presents recent works by Arina Antonova and Maya Hottarek, focusing on the body, the senses, and modes of communication. In her objects and installations, Arina Antonova explores how materiality can convey gesture, movement, and human emotion. Working primarily with clay, she engages the performative and sensual qualities of the body. Situated within feminist critical thought, her practice questions the notion of the body as a tool or vessel, proposing instead an understanding of the body as lived experience, shaped through care and repetition. Her Call for Action (2022-2024) series features sculptural ceramic pieces that can be activated through intuitive physical interaction. In this project, Antonova investigates the space that emerges through friction between boundaries and freedom, strength and vulnerability. The shapes and colours of the objects are inspired by plastic bracelets the artist’s mother used to wear in the 1990s — an ambiguous period in the history of Antonova’s native USSR, marked by the hopes, promises, and seductions of capitalist freedom. Call for Action has been presented through a series of performative activations developed in collaboration with contemporary dancers. This collective, practice-based research into the dialogue between form and motion is an integral part of the project. Tongue Sculpture (2023) and Big Tongue (2025) are part of the broader project I’m Not an Island, I’m a Body of Water, which considers the body as sensitive and mutable, shaped by relationships and lived experience. The tongue is one of the few organs that operates both inside and outside, remaining in constant contact with the environment and other bodies. Through both touch and language, it participates in the body’s ongoing formation.

Maya Hottarek explores complex interactions between the individual, society, and the economy. She works across a range of media and techniques, including installation, ceramics, collage, manual printing, sound, and video, reflecting on a reality shaped by new and post-materialist perspectives and panpsychic thought. Her practice unfolds within a domain that resists binary divisions between nature and artifice, the organic and the inorganic, the human and that which lies beyond it. Her sculptures Introverted Extrovert (2024) and Extroverted Introvert (2024), made in Chinese porcelain, articulate Hottarek’s interest in the relationship between the body and socio- economic conditions, as well as in modes of existence within a world in constant motion. Their playful forms — shifting between the spiral of a snail shell and a human ear — draw on the idea of a dwelling or portable container (also a body): a means of self-sustaining within an environment to which one must remain both perceptive and cautious.