NIKI

It is 2019 when I first meet June – I am a new mother then and feel alien in my own body, perhaps because the body I have lived in for so long no longer feels like my own. I hardly have time to take care of myself, milk is leaking from my breasts and I am lonely like never before. My life has been turned inside out like a piece of clothing that you pull over your head and, with the inside turned outwards, take off. That's how I feel when I meet June for the first time, turned inside out, empty, a fragile vessel, hollow. At the time, June is giving birth to a new body of work. She is preparing her exhibition No Osso (In the Bone) at Uma Certa Falta de Coerência. Her sculptures seem to hold something within - echoes of bodies, of absence, of structures made to hold or contain - and I immediately sense a connection between my situation, my body, the memory of pain or the pain of memory, June herself and her work. Understanding takes place in the inbetween, in the untold. Hollow spaces offer room for such understandings. Before Junes departure in 2019, she offers me a knitted top - this gesture of care meant more to me than the object itself – I still keep it as a loving memento. Memory appears to be an important aspect in June's work - memory also in the sense of physical remembrance - I am reminded that invisible scars still itch, even if they are covered by beauty with support structures in place. Fast forward to 2025, a lot has happened since our first encounter. The room that once served as my cave in 2019, my bedroom, has now become the vessel for NIKI. June fills this room with an enlarged photograph of another knitted top, her own, folded and held together with sewing needles – needles that are now as big and deadly as swords. Empty construction tubes and photographs of my former self of 2019 lie across the floor. Looking back, it all makes sense: closure and decision-making also pave the way for new beginnings, like an endless unfolding of inevitable transformations.