Creationspring — a duo show by Alex Zika and Elias Mahdavi Zika at Kaffeemitte, September – December 2025.
The paintings in the exhibition Creationspring of Alex Zika and Elias Mahdavi Zika conjure imagined topographies and spaces of interiority — some readable as caves and rooms, where ghosts, books, family, artistic gestures and fragments of language drift through layers of memory and matter.
Though situated in figuration, the works display a tendency toward permeability and self-dissolution, presenting identity as a shifting text: mutable, haunted, and perpetually in flux. Drawing on Agamben’s concept of potentiality and Bakhtin’s dialogism, they resist closure and open space for dialogue between the visible and the imaginary, the personal and the collective.
Borges and Odysseus spirits permeate these images as well. The paintings hold too much and too little at once — echoes of expansive perception, the blending and entanglement of disparate influences and voices and a yearning for a reconnection with our primal roots.
Within this ambiguity, those fictional environments become playful memory chambers, where the self is both rediscovered and endlessly reimagined.
Alex Zika — Instagram: creationspring.art
Elias Mahdavi Zika — Instagram: e1i4s_m
