Mara Verhoogt

RomaniaArtists

Biography

Mara Verhoogt(2001) is Bucharest based artist working across video, ceramics and textile. Her work balances the grotesque and the paradisiacal channeling a carnivalesque sensibility. She is interested in bodies, how they function in relation to other bodies, objects, and symbols, and often works through themes of eruption and overspill, driven by a desire to transgress boundaries and escape containment. This sensibility is rooted in a fascination with the porous threshold between the sacred and the abject.

Archive records · BUNA vol.3 / 2025

Hay Fever, 2023 Video, 1080p Duration: 4 min 32 sec

Artists

The title of the work refers to spring allergies, when inhaled pollen causes irritation in an organism. The piece addresses ideas related to desire and symbiosis through a negotiation between symbolism and biology. Emerging out of an eco-feminist perspective, it calls for a reconsideration of gender binaries, serving as a subversion of the violent and domineering connotations attached to the act of penetration. In Freudian psychoanalysis, the male sexual organ is an object of envy for women, while for second-wave feminist theorists, it is an object of domination and violence. In my work, the organ is purely a sensory instrument, desire is pursued head-first, and through the act of penetration, the constant rhythm of life is expressed.