- Visual Art
- Installation
Welcome to Sweetlick Beach
Enny Wokna
3 July 2026 19:00 – 4 July 2026 00:00
4 July 2026 18:00 – 5 July 2026 00:00
5 July 2026 18:00–19:00
“Willkommen am Schleckstrand” (Welcome to Sweetlick Beach) takes visitors to a coastline that invites them to devour. The cross-media installation constructs a fiction at the threshold between pleasure, desire, repression, and decay.
The starting point of the work is candy seashells that carry a certain irony: their sugar cores are encased in plastic replicas of cockle shells. Seashells are generally associated with beauty – even though they are in fact skeletons, albeit exoskeletons.
Inspired by these candy seashells, the installation presents various objects: for example, a sugar-glazed seagull skeleton integrated into a logic of pleasure, or a sugary Venus rising from a scallop shell, referencing Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.
An acrylic painting on cardboard is also part of the installation. Visually, it draws on the aesthetics of advertising while simultaneously subverting them. The motif – a sunset over the sea alongside some of the sugar objects – references the packaging design of conventional candy seashells, yet appears as a hand-painted image. In this way, it opens spaces for imagination and longing that extend beyond the desire for consumption.
The installation is complemented by a series of photographs. Dressed in costume-like, garish outfits, adults consume the sugar objects, unfolding a spectrum of intoxicated states.
Underlying it all is the sea: a place suspended between romanticized longing and destructive elemental force. Ultimately, the “oceanic experience” at Sweetlick Beach becomes one of total absorption – a world that is devoured while the self remains at its center.
The starting point of the work is candy seashells that carry a certain irony: their sugar cores are encased in plastic replicas of cockle shells. Seashells are generally associated with beauty – even though they are in fact skeletons, albeit exoskeletons.
Inspired by these candy seashells, the installation presents various objects: for example, a sugar-glazed seagull skeleton integrated into a logic of pleasure, or a sugary Venus rising from a scallop shell, referencing Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.
An acrylic painting on cardboard is also part of the installation. Visually, it draws on the aesthetics of advertising while simultaneously subverting them. The motif – a sunset over the sea alongside some of the sugar objects – references the packaging design of conventional candy seashells, yet appears as a hand-painted image. In this way, it opens spaces for imagination and longing that extend beyond the desire for consumption.
The installation is complemented by a series of photographs. Dressed in costume-like, garish outfits, adults consume the sugar objects, unfolding a spectrum of intoxicated states.
Underlying it all is the sea: a place suspended between romanticized longing and destructive elemental force. Ultimately, the “oceanic experience” at Sweetlick Beach becomes one of total absorption – a world that is devoured while the self remains at its center.
Biography
Enny Wokna
Enny Wokna studied art with a focus on time-based media at HFBK Hamburg and educational science and philosophy at the University of Hamburg. Her practice spans installation, object, film, and performance. She works with simple materials such as found objects, cardboard, sand, sugar, bones, and wood.
Her curiosity about the world finds a place in her artistic practice, where she asks questions without the need to resolve them. Experiences from physical practice in nature, as well as her own teaching, inform her work. She creates spaces in which relationships between people, materials, and the environment are negotiated, allowing contradictory feelings to coexist.
Enny Wokna lives and works in Berlin.
Her curiosity about the world finds a place in her artistic practice, where she asks questions without the need to resolve them. Experiences from physical practice in nature, as well as her own teaching, inform her work. She creates spaces in which relationships between people, materials, and the environment are negotiated, allowing contradictory feelings to coexist.
Enny Wokna lives and works in Berlin.
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