CURRENT
Soft Power by Alisa Heil
Sep 13th—Oct 11th, 2026
We're pleased to invite to the opening of Alisa Heil's SOFT POWER, on Sunday, September 13th at 6 PM.
Soft Power is an immersive installation in which crystals, charms, sound, light and scent come together to create a performative environment. The work emerges at a moment when public life is increasingly defined by polarization, while established geopolitical narratives are being fundamentally reconfigured.
Drifting from its origins in cultural diplomacy, Soft Power displaces the strategic language of persuasion, of winning “hearts and minds”, with the seductive glittering generality of LOVE, proposing gentleness not as a tactic of influence but as a mode of agency and love as a force for positive transformation.
Rather than focusing on coercion or control, Alisa explores the subtle ways in which we are shaped by desire, intimacy and shared experiences. The exhibition positions softness not in opposition to power, but as a transformative mode of relation: a capacity to reshape reality through permeability rather than imposition.
Here, power is understood as something that moves through atmospheres, memories and cultural forms, quietly shaping how we perceive ourselves and relate to others. Borders remain fluid, while agency emerges within the delicate dynamics of attention, attraction and mutual entanglement. The visitor is never simply an observer, but becomes part of the installation’s choreography.
Alisa Heil (Germany, 1986) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Porto. Through immersive environments, she explores desire, memory and the symbolic structures of visual culture.. Drawing from folklore, literature and popular culture, her work inhabits the porous territory between fiction and reality, intimacy and collective imaginary.
Heil studied Performance at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, followed by postgraduate studies at Bauhaus University Weimar and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, for which she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship.
Her work has been presented internationally in exhibitions, performances, screenings and biennials, including Manifesta 11, Zurich; the 12th Havana Biennial; the Marrakech Biennale; Culturgest Porto; the Bienal de Arte Contemporânea da Maia; Palais des Arts, Marseille; and Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin.
Selected solo exhibitions include DIVORCE or how to dance a Damensolo at A Maior, Viseu (2025), Tiresias und der kleine Tod at Espaço Mira, Porto (2022), Spieglein Spieglein at Bombon Projects, Barcelona (2021), Planet der Sirenen at Galeria Nuno Centeno, Porto (2020), American Cream at Julius Cæsar Gallery, Chicago (2016) and Presente Invasivo at A Certain Lack of Coherence, Porto (2014).
In 2017, Alisa Heil founded Kunsthalle Freeport, an independent curatorial platform through which she has organized exhibitions and collaborative projects. Within this framework, she also hosts 13 Moons, an ongoing reading programme dedicated to literature, critical theory, and contemporary culture.
UPCOMING
IN THE ARMS OF MYTH
by Evy Jokhova
Opening
Sunday Oct 18th, 5.30 PM
Figura Avulsa is pleased to present In The Arms Of Myth, an exhibition of context specific works by Evy Jokhova — opening with an original musical performance, The Three Fates, created in collaboration with Ellen Hörnberg, Mirjam Külm and Hannah Smithies, on Sunday, September 18th, at 5.30 PM. The exhibition will be on view by appointment until November 29th, 2026.
The exhibition conjures crafted objects, sociality, collaboration and ceremony — Evy’s mode is all encompassing, trespassing, and in search of the magical. She activates the space of Figura Avulsa’s kitchen and its well, with a three-performer song —The Three Fates— spinning into the depths of the courtyard’s cistern. The other works on view act as a score or props: anthropomorphic vases of edible pickles, a flag-painting-sculpture becoming shelter, a drawn love-poem about an eclipse…
The Three Fates overlaps three monologues or three voices in which the Spinner, the Weaver, and the Cutter each introduce themselves — sisters bound by blood, resentment, and an unspoken grief, each claiming their own rightness, misunderstanding, and singular purpose. The piece traces the arc of a human life — or perhaps the arc of a single relationship — from desire and birth through control and entanglement to severance and release, structured around a shared refrain that functions as both anchor and incantation: a descending spiral from search to leaving, each Fate claiming and inflecting it according to her nature, the voices converging until the thread is spun, held, and severed. The work moves between the sensual, the obsessive, and the severe —funny, intimate, poetic — a ritual of three women speaking themselves into being, and then out of it again.The well becomes a visual metaphor for the cauldron: the singers sing into it, amplifying their voices, while wearing ceremonial gowns of just over a thousand small ceramic leaves, modelled on Mayan ritual gowns made of shell plates, that make a sound of their own. Across these elements, contemporary anxiety is refracted through an ancient world drama, where every relationship forms its own uneasy triangle. The project takes its root from the three Fates — the Norns of Norse mythology, Urðr, Verðandi and Skuld, who weave the threads of fate and tend to Yggdrasil at the centre of the cosmos, and their counterparts the Moirai of Greek and Roman myth, Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, who control the thread of life from birth to death.
Jokhova uses mythology here as a tool to demystify the contemporary, arguing that our increasingly unstable times have more in common with the wild tales of Nordic and Greek mythology than with the orderly modern lives we recently believed we led.
Evy Jokhova is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice engages with dialogue and relationships between social anthropology, architecture, philosophy and art. Working with drawing, sculpture, installation, sound, film and performance, she aims to bridge gaps between these fields and their inherent hierarchical structures.
A graduate of MA Fine Art, Royal College of Art (2011) and MA Political Communications, Goldsmiths College (2013), Jokhova is the recipient of numerous awards including Arts Council Individual Grants Award (2018), Royal Academy Schools Fellowship (2016-19), Royal British Society of Sculptors Bursary Award (2017-18), Wien Kultur Förderung (2017) and Amsterdam Fonds voor Kultur (2018).
Solo exhibitions include: Oasis, curated by Paulius Petraitis, Meduza, Vilnius (2025); Three Colours: Flesh, 3+1 Arte Contemporânea, Lisbon (2025); Three Colours: Shadow, curated by Filipa Oliveira, Galeria Municipal de Arte, Almada (2023); Three Colours: Green, 3+1 Arte Contemporânea, Lisbon (2022); How to live together, CBK Zuidoost, Amsterdam (2018); The Shape of Ritual, project commissioned by Belvedere Museum, Vienna (2017); Towering in the conditions of fragments, Passengers, London (2017); Staccato, Marcelle Joseph Projects, London (2016).
Recent group exhibition include: Signs, Games, Messages, curated by Harald Krejci, Galerie Petra Seiser, Gmunden (2026); Prémio Novos Artistas Fundação EDP, curated by Catarina Rosendo, Luís Silva and Sérgio Mah, MAAT, Lisbon (2025); Liebe und Tod im Garten der Götter, Zeller Van Almsick, Vienna (2024); DRYADS OF COSQUER, curated by Merilin Talumaa and Justė Kostikovaitė, La Traverse, Marseille (2024); Art in the Age of the Anthropocene, curated by Linda Kaljundi, Eha Komissarov, Ulrike Plath,Bart Pushaw and Tiiu Saadoja, Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn (2023); Goddesses and Warriors: 100 Years to Marija Gimbutas, House of Histories at the Lithuanian National Museum, Vilnius, LT (2022); WOTRUBA. Himmelwärts, curated by Gabrielle Stöger-Spevak, Belvedere Museum, Vienna (2021); Art in the Plague Year, curated by Douglas McCulloh, Nikolay Maslov & Rita Souther, UCR California Museum of Photography, California (2021); On Photographic Beings, Latvian National Museum, Riga (2020); Boundary Layers, Yarat Contemporary Art Space, Baku (2019); Prevent this Tragedy, Dateagle / Vongoetz Art, London (2018); Contemporary Sculpture Fulmer, Better Living: Tenderflix film festival, The Horse Hospital, London (2017) amongst others.
Since 2014 the artist has run Allotment – a collaborative research project that explores social relationships and cultural politics through food
Evy Jokhova, In The Arms of Myth, 2026