For the 2019 Edition of Art Karlsruhe we are pleased to present the works of four women artists, revolving around identity, home, exile, and belonging.

Alia Ali has a Yemeni-Bosnian background. Having lived in Morocco for a long time, she is now based in Los Angeles, USA. In her work, she explores the borderland experience, the ambivalence of exclusion and inclusion, through the work with textiles in which she wraps her figures.

Jitka Hanzlová fled Czechoslovakia in the 1980s, received political asylum, and has since lived in Germany. Throughout her career, Hanzlová has used photography to address the ways in which one’s homeland and surrounding environment shape identity.
"We coexist with our past and memory. Living in exile means parking one's memory, parking one's language and living on one leg -- losing one's balance, drawing hope from the future."
- Jitka Hanzlová

Liu Xia belonged to Beijing's avant-garde in the 1980s, came under increasing political pressure after her marriage to the philosopher and later Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, and had to spend eight years under house arrest. She has been living in exile in Berlin since July 2018. In her photographs, she thematizes imprisonment, forced silence, but also the world in captivity that has shrunk to a miniature format.

Laura J. Padgett was born in America and received her degrees at the Pratt Institute in New York and the Städelschule in Frankfurt. In her work she explores unoccupied spaces, both real and imaginary, to reveal truths that are often overlooked. She travels along the complex interfaces between memory and the present, between private and public, between nature and culture.