Anna Laudel Düsseldorf presents multidisciplinary artist Lal Batman’s solo exhibition “The Floor is Lava” between 1 December 2023 – extended 24 February 2024. Inspired by commonly known children’s games played in schoolyards, the exhibition exceeds beyond the innocence of childhood games, to delve into more complex themes such as ridden anxiety, impending catastrophes, and dangerous memories that await the adult mindset. Through her art, Batman aims to explore multifaceted aspects of the human psyche and the anxieties that can manifest as people transit from childhood to adulthood.

“This exhibition will make you feel like your feet were swept off the ground.”

Says Lal Batman about her first solo exhibition in Germany, Düsseldorf, which includes artworks that will be unveiled to meet the audience for the first time which differs distinctly in style and format from her previous oeuvres. The artist creates a conglomerate of futuristic landscapes, underworld scenarios, and mental states in her video works all the while maintaining a witty and ironic distance from the narrative content.

Batman’s self-composed soundtracks which highly resemble ASMR, induce trance-like states in the audience, making them feel immobilized by the screen. Whereas the sculptures in the exhibition with their preposterous size and mass, mirror the bizarre, grotesque and also sinister games of childhood.

Batman’s artistic expression also concerns the age of accelerating digitalization and our interaction with social media. She parallels this reality, this meta-world, in her own work by alluding to the search for security, affirmation, relationships and expectations. She vividly communicates the need of the human psyche for love, tenderness and harmony as well as the irresistible fascination for  evil, horror and destruction.

The audience will move through the exhibition more like crossing a floor transforming meter by meter into lava, as the gallery space will be modified so as to draw people in and out of  perilous yet intriguing dreams or nightmares.

Lal Batman’s work, presented for the very first time in Germany, can be seen in the playful and daring exhibition, “The Floor is Lava”, as of December 1st  2023 extended until February 4th 2024 at Anna Laudel Düsseldorf.