Jakob Limmer (*1988, Bamberg) studied media art from 2016 to 2020 at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig under Joachim Blank in the class for installation and space. Prior to this, he studied sound design within the MultiMediaArt program at the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences.

I create sculptural wall-mounted and freestanding objects in which contrasting materials enter into physical and functional tension. I investigate how structures act upon the body and how spaces for agency can emerge within this relationship. My main interest lies in the ambivalence of structure itself. We rely on systems, rules, and constructed environments, while at the same time experiencing them as conditions that shape, constrain, and sometimes provoke resistance.

This tension is central to both the subject and the making of my work. I use processes of compression, stretching, deformation and suspension to develop forms, allowing materials to actively influence the outcome. Rigid structural elements encounter silicone, soft polyurethane foam, and other body-related materials, establishing physical conditions in which neither the material nor the final shape is entirely under my control. The process becomes a negotiation between my own decisions and the material’s agency. I establish conditions, but the material responds, resists, yields, and ultimately participates in determining the form.

Through this process, I create transitional states between stability and dissolution, control and yielding, protection and vulnerability. Their tactile qualities are often suggested rather than directly experienced, making softness, elasticity, and resistance perceptible through sight. The resulting objects often occupy an ambiguous space between structure and body, function and dysfunction, object and image. Their forms may suggest holding, supporting, enclosing, compressing, or suspending without fully resolving which side ultimately prevails.

I seek to create works in which this ambiguity can be experienced intuitively. Rather than illustrating a fixed idea of resistance or control, the works leave these relationships open, allowing viewers to recognize their own position within processes of constraint, adaptation, and agency.