Clothes (Kleidung) by Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo)
Curated by Anna Roberta Goetz and Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo
Installation View, Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo), Clothes (Kleidung), 2026_4, Photo by Manuel Carreon Lopez
“Love is expressed through care, responsibility, respect, knowledge, and trust. It is something we do: a commitment to the wellbeing of ourselves and others.”
Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo, widely known as Puppies Puppies, engages this year’s curated by theme, LOVE, through bell hooks’ understanding of love as a practice rather than an emotion. This conception of love has long informed the installation and performance artist’s Gesamtkunstwerk-like approach. She has repeatedly introduced actionable and participatory elements into her exhibitions, using the platform afforded to her as an artist to provide forms of care and practical support for people whose wellbeing is not adequately served by public infrastructures—including trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit+ individuals. Her exhibitions have, for example, incorporated a public shower as well as an HIV testing and counselling room. Her work proposes care for one another, and particularly for one’s community, as both a responsibility and a source of collective strength.
Installation View: Clothes (Kleidung), 2026, curated by Anna Roberta Goetz & Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo at Galerie Kandlhofer (Photo: Manuel Carreon Lopez)
Within Puppies Puppies’ oeuvre, ordinary and found objects often become charged with personal, social, and political meaning. Working across sculpture, installation, and performance, she brings questions of identity, power, embodiment, and lived experience into the exhibition space, exploring how personal experience can become a site of collective reflection.
The exhibition Clothes (Kleidung) takes clothing as both its material and conceptual point of departure. It is intimate and public at once: it touches and protects the body, conceals and exposes it, shapes its appearance, and communicates how a person wishes to be seen. It carries traces of bodies and lives, becoming repositories of memory, identity, vulnerability, desire, and care.
For Clothes (Kleidung), Puppies Puppies presents three newly commissioned works. Clothing Drive (for Trans, Queer, GNC and 2S+ people) (2026), for example, takes the form of a social sculpture. It consists of clothing donated before and throughout the exhibition and made available free of charge to trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit+ individuals. As clothes are taken and new ones donated and added, the sculpture continually dissolves and re-forms, extending from the exhibition space out into society.
Venus of the Rags (Transitioned) (2026), meanwhile, appropriates and transitions an art-historical icon: Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Venus of the Rags (1967). Here, Venus, an iconic motif of the Western art canon, takes the form of the artist’s own body, while clothes she no longer wears are complemented with found ones that become the rags. Bringing together two bodies and different moments in time, the work suggests transformation not as a rejection of the past, but as a way of carrying it forward.
Together, the works understand clothes as more than objects. They touch and protect the body, carry traces of past selves, communicate identity, and move between people. They hold memory while also enabling change. This understanding of clothing connects directly to bell hooks’ conception of love as an active practice. To care is to act; to recognise another person’s needs is to take responsibility for their wellbeing. In Clothes (Kleidung), love therefore becomes material: it is found in what is remembered, reclaimed, shared, given away, and made available to another.
Clothing Drive (for Trans, Queer, GNC and 2S+ people) and Venus of the Rags (Transitioned) are complemented by a further newly commissioned work, Pink Triangle (Holocaust patch transitioning into a reclaimed symbol by grassroots political action group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power)) (2026).
During the Nazi era, the pink triangle was used in concentration camps to identify prisoners persecuted and imprisoned on the grounds of their actual or perceived homosexuality. Individuals who crossed traditional gender boundaries or wore clothing associated with another gender were prosecuted either under Paragraph 175, which criminalized sexual acts between men, or under broader, vaguely defined provisions concerning “public nuisance” or “asocial” behavior.
In the 1980s, the LGBTQ+ movement reclaimed the pink triangle as a symbol of queer resistance and AIDS solidarity. Puppies Puppies presents the triangle in constant motion, holding these histories of violence and resistance in continuous tension while making visible how symbols can be and are constantly contested, reclaimed, and transformed.
Written by Anna Roberta Goetz
Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Kandlhofer, Photo: Manuel Carreon Lopez
