Nancy Lupo “Princessletthewind” at Kunstverein für Mecklenburg

With “Princessletthewind”, the Kunstverein für Mecklenburg und Vorpommern in Schwerin presents the first institutional solo exhibition of the American sculptor Nancy Lupo in Germany.

Lupo’s artistic practice is deeply connected to material culture, including language, and draws attention to our presence amidst everyday materials and spaces. The artist examines how collective fantasies, emotions, energies, and ideologies are embedded in these (infra)structures and objects—elements that may be inherited, often overlooked, or entirely fabricated. In this exploration, Lupo not only questions societal structures and material conditions but also develops a perspective that reflects the entire interplay of affective, material, and imaginary practices.

For “Princessletthewind”, an installation created specifically for the spaces of the Kunstverein, Lupo builds upon her most recent body of work, which explores forms of “cruel optimism“—a concept introduced by the American cultural theorist Lauren Berlant. According to Berlant, “a relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (Berlant, 2011). When applied to objects of desire, this concept refers to a cluster of promises that someone or something appears to offer or fulfill. Such a cluster of promises can be embedded in a person, an object, an institution, a text, a norm, or an idea—or, as Nancy Lupo demonstrates, in synthetic pearls, traditional Erzgebirge Christmas pyramids, Weimar porcelain candelabras, festive decorative papers, and glass crystalware, among others.

Considering such objects as clusters of promises allows both Berlant and Lupo to engage with the enigmatic and disjointed nature of our affective attachments—those multifaceted potentialities inherent in objects that fuel subjective desires, whether individually or collectively. Both, Berlant and Lupo, make evident that these projections are never neutral but are interwoven with class-specific, racialized, sexual, and gender-coded stances.

In the context of the exhibition, a text eponymously titled “Princessletthewind”, written by Lupo, reflects the artists‘s personal experiences with the fires in Athens and Los Angeles, as well as their entanglement in the concept and development of the exhibition. The text evolves throughout the duration of the exhibition and will be presented by Lupo at the closing event.

Curated by
Hendrike Nagel

at Kunstverein für Mecklenburg
until March 30, 2025