18 Questions With...
Nora Langen

At the moment, I’m really inspired by being back in Cologne, it feels like returning to a city that’s constantly in a dynamic conversation with itself, even though somehow nothing seems to have changed. I’m collaborating with artists and curators who are reshaping what the scene here means today, while working in my small studio and walking through the streets of my hometown after seven years in Leipzig. Lately, I’ve been really into researching Cologne’s exhibition history from the 1990s and revisiting old and new gallery spaces and tracing how things have evolved. And honestly, spending time with my mother in the Vulkaneifel has been just as inspiring: picking plums together and asking her endless questions about her life.

A perfect day would be spending time in the studio and losing track of time, helping install something at the gallery, surrounded by people who care about the same things I do. Visiting an opening and an endless night with all my loved ones. But it can just as well be a quiet day of nothing.

Super introverted, extremely emotional, laughing and crying. I spend most of the time in garden, planting and playing with insects. I didn't speak that much.

What motivates me is movement and curiosity: a mix of focus and chaos. It’s the kind of excitement that somehow always feeds my work. But honestly, it's also the difficult moments. Once I’ve worked through them, I feel even more driven, as if something inside has recharged.

I document the small injuries I get while working: cuts, bruises, burns. Each injury becomes a timestamp, a kind of working relic, the physical trace of the process of self-defense. It’s a wide archive, something between pain and proof: part of the work.

My mother for her strength, my father for his rationality, my sister for her carefree attitude.

Clay. It’s alive in a way that few materials are. It records everything: every gesture, every failure, every hesitation. Sometimes it breaks, sometimes it holds. I like that it doesn’t forget: it becomes an archive of action, like the body does in the studio.

I usually hear the gym next door at Hansaring. Most of the time it’s terrible music — sometimes it pushes me, other times I just have to turn my own music up to block it out. Right now, I’ve been listening to a lot to Dean Blunt, Oklou, and Eartheater.

The first thing I notice about people are their eyes and their hands. You can see how sensitive someone is without a word being spoken. For me, it’s almost like a language of its own: quiet, physical, and entirely honest. The way they hold a glass, a pencil, or move. I feel like you can read everything through their hands.

Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag.

Rome.

At the walls — if there are any.

Diving 15 meters deep in Miami during Art Basel Miami, I ruptured my eardrum. I couldn’t fly back home, so I spent Christmas and New Year’s alone in New York.

Taking critique and staying calm.

I am interested in how organic forms develop armour, claws, spikes or horns, and I look at strength and vulnerability as related responses to social norms and prescriptions. I’m particularly fascinated by insects, so small yet so complex, their bodies evolving in strange ways, sometimes growing larger weapons while their sexual organs become smaller. There is also something poetic about poisonous plants, like nightshades that can both kill and heal. And of course, Kafka’s cockroaches and Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch insects always linger somewhere in the background of my thinking and in my traumatized dreams.

My five years at Bistro 21 in Leipzig were both challenging and incredibly formative. With over ten years of experience working in galleries, projects, and institutions, I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to challenge myself and continue developing my skills. I truly love talking about art, with anyone. Working with so many different artists, each exhibition brought its own set of challenges. Finding solutions that respected the artists’ intentions while helping to realize their ideas became a constant act of problem-solving, and for me, that was one of the main sources of inspiration. You’re not just organizing things; you become a point of contact for every detail, every question, every problem that arises. I really enjoy that kind of collaboration. Through this work, I’ve developed a deeper sense of empathy: connecting with people while staying focused and precise, allowing others’ voices to come through while also forming my own opinions. Being part of creating a scene, sharing ideas, and exploring conceptual and theoretical themes where people find connections—while always following my own ethical and artistic standards to ensure everything runs smoothly and the community is strengthened from within—has been central to my practice.

At the same time, I’ve learned to find a balance between curating and making my own work. It’s always shifting, and I don’t want to separate the two: they continuously feed into each other.

I’ll always remember a performance I did in 2017 in San Sebastián together with Mark Jenkins. We decided that I would sit in the middle of a busy shopping street next to a sculpture we had made. I was just sitting on a bench, pretending everything was normal, while people slowly gathered around, staring and taking photos. I ignored the attention and simply left after a few minutes. It was such a simple gesture, but it revealed how easily public space, perception, and everyday life can blur into one another.

My practice puts the body, and especially the hands, at the center of a conversation, treating the body as a site, medium, tool, and weapon in exploring self-defense and bodily autonomy. For me, self-defense is not only a physical technique but also a pathway to self-determination that unfolds through bodily awareness, training, and artistic practice.

Violence and domination appear in many forms and are often invisible. Our experience of vulnerability is shaped by social, cultural and political forces, and emotions and norms condition how we perceive and respond to threats. Who is allowed to defend themselves is always mediated by power and privilege. That apparent vulnerability can also be a source of resistance. The unequal distribution of the right and means to defend life, and to insist that protection and autonomy are often subversive acts in unequal systems. My hands are both maker and defender, capable of creating and of striking.