install shots by Deniz Guzel during group show Tender like Asphalt group show with Xiaochi Dong, Kalpesh Lathigra & myself at Sherbet Green, London, UK.


“Juliette Lena Hager’s sculptural assemblages explore structures and social rituals that negotiate and frame individual and collective experience. A governing principle within the body of work presented in Tender like asphalt is reality as a set of objects, structures and interactions that happen quietly and unnoticed, in constant, timeless flow, and the artist’s need to question and disassemble these existential rituals.
This plays out across the installation as a choreography, a rehearsed palimpsest where objects adopt the role of performer, revealing residual aspects of themselves that go beyond a utilitarian function, showcasing their inherent symbolisms. 

Derealisation, perception during dissociative states and the disassembling of the self-evident are important concepts within this body of work. They underpin the lens through which the artist is approaching game, theatre and stage — in their somewhat fakeness, atemporality and simulation. Hager negotiates these scenes by setting her own compositional stages using objects that hold individual histories, exemplified by their marks, wear and materiality. This point of departure, working with items selected for their various rhythms, their fragments carrying dynamic associations, allots her room to then redraw these paths of communication in relation to the other objects in the installation, abstracting and re-appropriating them into warped theatres that encapsulate both the complexity and rigidity of social rituals and behaviours.”

Text by Mazzy Mae Green