The assortment of available masks clarifies today’s (anti-) heroes: the ‘bad’ and the ‘good’ politicians ridiculed and idealised celebrities. Their standardised appearance conceals every human expression. The Loosdrecht busts also functioned primarily as a symbol and only to a lesser extent as a portrait. The presentation of this type of figures was a (modest) political ‘statement’. Kramer’s busts are life-sized and arranged at a conference table, a setting referring to the private meetings of the world’s leaders. The busts are the representatives of a clan whose identity and motives are not always clear.

Traditional porcelain busts wear a carnival mask—a time-honoured way of assuming another’s identity for a while. Mask-wearing offers a playful way to imagine what it’s like to be in someone else’s skin. But Kramer disrupts this custom too by using caricatures of powerholders and stereotypes. Yet again, the composition of the disguised busts lined up on the conference table underlines the contradiction inherent in different kinds of power display. The imagining of the human body and our physical relationship with sculptures and objects is a recurring theme in Kramer’s oeuvre.

ZUS, KUT, GOD, STRAIGHT, MOM, FUCK, NO, FATHER and unnamed uncles, concealed loved ones, half-bleeds and mongrels, oldest daughters, nieces and never-born sons, cast-off great aunts, unknown mothers and stepfathers - they all look at you as or they are the spectators, as if they sit in a grandstand for the performance of life. The basis for all images is printing in a limited number of templates. By exchanging and adapting physiological characteristics, they together form the portrait of a family. They hang together in clusters to emphasize relationships and isolations within kinship. Set-up and title are derived from a contemporary, popular form of psychological therapy, in which representation and arranging for family members play a crucial role.

Amsterdam – Berlin, gas stations along the A1 and A2 in Germany: on hundreds of toilet doors between Hannover and Berlin a German company advertizes sophisticated stoves, fire places, heaters and other equipment that, belying their high-tech character, are able to realize home-made warmth in every living room. The installation HOME MADE ENERGY highlights the things that represent homeliness and warmth. Through countless processes of reproduction that are inaccessible to the end user, the grid, material and shape of the heaters’ elements refer to the construction of ceramic tile stoves traditionally used in Southern Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Eastern Europe to distribute warmth ‘democratically’ across several rooms. Kramer metaphorically translates heating systems into monumental installations that generate public warmth. The stove-like ceramic objects, moulded on upholstered panels of artificial leather and finished with a high-gloss glaze, are reminiscent of the plastic coated seating elements from the low-end furniture industry. The installations arise from the private and cultural necessity of heating while simultaneously realising warmth as a social and public affair. Contrary to expectation and in spite of their logical arrangements the objects do not consubstantiate with their purpose. According to Bruno Latour things can be understood as contentious issues: they keep us in check by various means to mark public conditions in a differential manner.

HOME MADE ENERGY shows how, with the addition of warmth, sculptures can suggest a sense of physicality. It is an invisible energy that we perceive with the body not the eye. For instance, in the form of radiating heat or when we are touched. The vast WARMTEBEELD IX / WARMTH SCULPTURE IX commands attention by virtue of its presence in the space. To all appearances, the work seems cladded in soft cushions, but these turn out to be ceramic tiles, like those that cover the projecting cube. This element is heated and may be gently touched. But physical contact doesn’t go unnoticed—fingers and hands leave traces.

In the works WB #6 to WB #8 Kramer uses a 3D construction drawing of a cushion to mill the polystyrene mold. She can put dents or bumps on the mold, just as if someone sat on it and uses a special glaze for the surface, which, when charged by light or heat, emits fluorescent light for four hours. This visually transforms the heavy ceramic works into transparent, almost extraterrestrial, spongy forms. They radiate energy – literally and figuratively – and therefore heat.

The object’s original purpose, whether we are talking about today’s kitsch or a prehistoric artefact, is not relevant for Kramer here. She appropriates these images by focusing on their visual features, and then breathes fresh life into them by casting them in different materials and formats. Ignoring an item’s original context, such as its material, and its historical or political significance, will enable us to explore, both individually and collectively, the significance of the ‘Venus phenomenon’.

Using imprints in porcelain or rubber of prehistoric Venus figures, Bastienne Kramer searches for information in different directions. She sets out to investigate how the representation of a woman may have affected the maker’s decisions about form and size, and distinctions between images of a god and those of a mortal. Why do most famous Venus figures have no face, while their jewellery or hairstyles are modelled with great precision? Is an item of jewellery a hierarchical sign, a mark of respect, or a pre-sexist expression of a ‘pin-up’ model?

Kramer constantly encounters different reproductions of the same figurines in which each one highlights a different aspect. Sometimes it is the skin, the size, the colour, and sometimes it is the mode of presentation: on a stick and a small pedestal in a museum, as a souvenir in the form of a key ring, or processed into a piece of jewelry. Who decides about the representation of the object? Who interprets the subject? What transformation takes place when she makes moulds from the impressions and casts them in porcelain, apart from the fact that porcelain shrinks by a factor of 15% in the kiln? As a series, these figurines represent yet another re-use of a thing, in this case of a significant artefact.

Besides the Venus figures, IDOLS XS also includes images of women from the ‘fun industry’, here mainly sexist designs of lighters with fire-breathing tits, women with their pants down, women with noise-making, luminous genitals, preferably women without a head or face and usually without arms and legs cast in the same porcelain or rubber, if we omit the lighter function the figures are scarcely distinguishable from ancient figurines of Venus. Some lighters are adorned with jewellery similar to those seen on images of Venus. Here too, questions arise regarding the client who commissioned the object, and the producers and users. It is conceivable that someone actually commissioned the item, for instance the designer/stylist of a company that supplies tourist shops around the world with knickknacks, but who made the original, and what were the examples or criteria according to which it was modelled? It seems unlikely that the Museum of Natural History in Vienna would have sent its prehistoric Venus collection to China to have casts made of the figurines there. However, it is quite likely that Chinese women, men and children have made casts of female figures en masse in synthetic materials and used them to make lighters. Sociologically speaking, we can only hazard a guess as to what kind of cultural exchange such activities represent.

She translates found objects into a different, often valuable medium such as clay and porcelain and then amplifies or resizes them, producing them in series, such as the work Idols XS Paris. The miniatures combine a wild array of female figures in everchanging compositions. The constellations flirt with different references. Art historical tropes such as a pieta, a reclining nude reminiscent of an odalisque or romantic scenes from ordinary life. The variations seem an unending transformation process of possibilities.