We would like to invite you to an exhibition with works by Matheline Marmy and Nejda, fellows of the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia as part of our Landis & Gyr Artistic fellowship programme.

Next Tuesday, 8 July, at 17:00 Matheline Marmy and Nejda will present their works in the Octopus Gallery. The exhibition at Octopus will take the form of an on-site artist presentation at 17:00 by Matheline Marmy, followed by Q&A from the CAS audience and an aperitif.

Mutandis

Description: Mutandis is an exhibition at Octopus Gallery featuring works by Matheline Marmy and Nejda, hosted by Vera Mlechevska, exploring themes of material transformation, language, and the passage of time.

The exhibition is composed of two works. Conteneur (25), by Matheline Marmy, is a low-stand sculpture placed on the floor, which has evolved multiple iterations since its original creation in 2019. Conteneur (25) takes the form of slender brass cast tubes interacting with the surrounding architecture as a living organ: a conduit, a vein, or a digestive system. Traces of water present both as material and memory run through the work, leaving traces and oxidations marking time and physical transformation.
The piece draws on the concept of lively materiality, as proposed by political theorist and philosopher Jane Bennett in “Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things”. A life, as a presence that does not coincide fully with any specific body; a “matter-energy” in constant variation, that enters assemblages and leaves them.1 By doing so, and through its watery activation, the work aims to challenge our perception of inanimate matter, and to activate a more sensitive relationship with it.

The second work, the digital video and poem Mutandis, Мутандис was created by Nejda as a poetic interpretation of the sculpture Conteneur (25). As Marmy’s piece explores the concepts of transformation and mutation through space and time, the poem Mutandis, Мутандис travels from English to French and Bulgarian in a creative dance with alphabets, words and languages. Physics states that everything is transformed. Alongside this principle, we can observe that culturally everything is transmitted, even without our knowledge or awareness of it. Alphabets are codes we can choose to use in order to hide or to reveal. But words have their own intrinsic power, and like vessels they lead us from the past to new ideas while evolving and being changed by our interactions with them. Mutandis, Мутандис takes the viewers on a dreamy journey of languages talking to each other and invites them into a story that can only be completely experienced by walking around its moving fragments. It doesn’t matter if we know why we understand something or not. What’s important is the underlying link that keeps us riding together while we honor our individualities and differences. Everything changes, everything moves, but everything is a gift from ancient knowledge and common venture.

Mutandis invites the audience into a contemplative space where the physical body, matter, and environment are intertwined. It reflects on our own states of change, be it personal, collective and planetary, through the languages of metal, water, images and words.
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Matheline Marmy is an artist based in Geneva, Switzerland, currently a fellow at Sofia Centre for Advanced Study Sofia. She is pursuing her art practice predominantly through sculpture, working extensively with manipulable and reactive materials such as metals, liquid compounds, textile, and glass. The resulting pieces form ‘systems’ or ‘environments,’ where processes emerge from material-human relationships, manifesting in form as objects involving time and transformation.

Matheline holds a BA from ECAL and a MFA from the Piet Zwart Institute. She has participated in several art residencies, including La Becque Execal, Berlin Alexanderplatz Pro Helvetia, Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Her work is regularly exhibited in Switzerland and internationally in group shows (Stadtgalerie, Bern, 2025 (duo show – forthcoming); Bourses de la Ville de Genève (forthcoming); Cité des Arts, Paris, 2024; Dragonerareal, Berlin, 2024; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, 2021) and solo shows (ABA Alexanderplatz, Berlin, 2024; Fondation Fluxum, Geneva, 2023; Lighthaus, Zurich, 2022).

She is also co-curating ‘Widefield’, a structure producing artist multiples.
www.mathelinemarmy.ch
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Nejda is a multidisciplinary artist born in Geneva, Switzerland, in a multicultural family from Swiss, French and Bulgarian descent. She studied visual arts, music and writing and has invented a distinctive path that mingles all these different fields together, using digital creation to bring all elements of her work into her own syncretic artistic expression.

In addition to traditional publishing, her poems are used as pieces featured in her visual creations – paintings, photographs, videos – as lyrics for songs or as parts of transdisciplinary live performances that she creates with the TLC Project, a collective poetry – constantly evolving – improvisation show she founded in New York in 2014.
Seeing art as an ongoing dialogue, she is always looking for ways to bring different creators together and keep the spectators, the readers and the public involved in the artistic experience. In a large part of her work, Nejda explores the idea of freedom and the ever-changing roles of our individual personalities in our human experience. She likes to play with what is shown and what is hidden, considering art a way to communicate beyond the inherent limitations of translation and cultural background.

She currently works in Europe and in the US and travels the world as a digital artist, a performing artist, a writer and an art director. She’s in Sofia as a recipient of a Landis und Gyr Stiftung fellowship studying Hristo Botev’s poetry in order to prepare the production of a TLC poetic performance show entitled “Botev and I”.
www.nejda.com/en
www.unpoemedenejda.com

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The exhibition is supported by: CAS – Centre for Advanced Study Sofia, Landis & Gyr Stiftung and the City of Geneva. Additional thanks to Belka Studio and Markovstudio for production.

Octopus Gallery is located in Sofia’s Largo, in the underpass between the Presidency and the Council of Ministers, under the stairs on Dondukov Blvd. 1, Sofia, Bulgaria.