Philosopher of her own Ruin, a group exhibition at Bonner Kunstverein curated by the late writer and art historian Alan Longino (1987–2024), is predicated on the figure of a fictional entity, or what Longino described as “a person, who passed from a moment of hypervisibility into invisibility at a critical juncture in their life.” Longino tragically passed during the planning of his exhibition, following a long struggle with illness. Honoring his wish to bring the show forward in his absence, the venue’s director, Fatima Hellberg, invited Longino’s friends and co-organizers—artist Andrew Christopher Green and curator Martha Joseph—to study his personal notes, drafts, and research on several artists from varied historical and geographical backgrounds.  Longino’s envisioned concept emerges across three partially enclosed, light-gray-toned, mostly dimly lit rooms, inviting a meditation on vulnerability, change, and transformation. The exhibition shrewdly manifests the artworks’ auratic presence, and the curator’s methods—such as authorial pursuit and enclosure—exquisitely resonate throughout.

The title Philosopher of her own Ruin was borrowed from Lisa Robertson’s Proverbs of a She-Dandy (2018), whose aphoristic and poetic passages on the figure of a “menopausal dandy” engage the ways women construct and navigate their identities in a society that often seeks to define and limit them. Both text and title serve as conductive threads to situate the artworks on display. Reprinted in an accompanying publication alongside texts by Longino, Robertson’s ruminations challenge social and cultural norms, creating a space for individuality and expression. To quote a few:

She will consider the concept of menopause and its pathological code as one of the covert products of modernity.
                                    
So being an idealist, she has caused her menopause, surgically, psychically, chemically, or by patiently waiting. It is her own. The state has no menopause, only productivity and loss.
 
She has entered an undocumented corporality. Excellent. Now the scintillating research can begin.
 
Longino’s choice of Robertson’s text was deliberate. On one hand, it mirrors the “entity” concept that he stoically defends, and on the other, it encodes what the organizers describe in their afterword as “life’s deviations into places unknown.” Said “deviations” encompass queries that Longino envisioned in his research (he was a doctoral student in art history at the University of Chicago at the time of the exhibition’s conception), including invisibility and vanishing, and how these themes inform the work of lesser known artists. These deviations are central to the exhibition, for they frame what the curator visualized as a new body operative that “plays with the dereliction of value”.—the potential to amplify, to juxtapose, to simultaneously conceal and reveal, but also to have each artwork generate its own unique meaning. The overall message translates to something more immanent than transcendent—an experience shaped by subtle attunements, both spatial and metaphorical.

The exhibition opens with two photographs by the Japanese photographer Toyoko Tokiwa (1928–2019), best known for her 1957 book Dangerous, Fruitless Flowers (危険な毒花), which focused on women’s work in Japan, including nurses, models, prostitutes, and wrestlers. Two black-and-white prints titled Oroku’s Room (1968) document a Ms. O (otherwise known as Ms. Oroku) gracefully smoking a pipe in a scene that one of the organizers described as “chaotic nobility.” A woman is seen posing with assertiveness and dignity surrounded by piles of garments, clothes, furniture, and mess, using the objects around her as props. These images focus on Tokiwa’s experience as a sex worker in post-occupation Yokohama, and her engagement with the subjects around her. Like Robertson’s text, Longino made indications that Tokiwa’s work be prominent,  and his curatorial premise describes the images as “the form of this new body after it has passed from a time of hyperfixation to near invisibility.”
 
Adjacent are two works by Susan Hiller encased in a glass box installed at waist height. Titled Painting Block (10): 1974/84, 34” x 54” (1980) and Painting Block (1): 1974/5, 48” x 48” (1980), they belong to her Painting Blocks series, composed of previously existing works on canvas disassembled, cut up, and sewn together. Their sizes are stencil numbered in marker pen corresponding to their original dimensions and dates. These works carry material memory and allude not only to material transformation, but also to a reconciliation with past life.
 
Like Hiller’s enclosed works, the exhibition’s scenography evokes containment. The space itself feels like a sequence of chambers, and the lighting encourages the viewer to focus on a single work at a time. The low ceilings and surrounding walls give a sense of shelter, entombment, and enclosure. Miyako Ishiuchi’s Mother’s #54 (2002) consists of a float-mounted photograph embedded into the wall depicting the artist’s mother’s lipsticks—golden cylinders that recall antique bullets. Ishiuchi began photographing her mother in 2000, and after her passing, she focused solely on capturing her personal belongings. These images evoke a sense of posthumous memorabilia and the enduring life of objects after one’s death. Nearby rests Linda Semadeni’s Schrank (2017), a piece of fragile unfired clay in the shape of a miniature and partially open dresser with etched toes and feet marked in brightly colored marker and pencil. This strange relic, too, is behind glass. Hellberg, reflecting on the exhibition, told me: “The notion that we must contain something enough, care for it enough, to be uncompromising—that’s one of the points of tension in the concept itself. The tragedy might be the proposition that you have this beautiful thing that you also can’t share.
 
To those who knew him, Longino was an erudite person, filled with endless curiosity. His benevolent charm, deep love of art and artists, and incorporeal eye were noteworthy. He was known to resuscitate artistic practices tucked away in history, reevaluating them and giving them new context. Marginal histories and subjects were often central to his exhibitions, and within art, he found the potential for boundless freedom. Longino was invested in bringing together people from different worlds. The dreamlike painting Sömmen (The Sleep) (2000) by Swedish painter Bertram Schmiterlöw, showing a nude ethereal body in a liminal space, is one example of his unorthodox choices. Similar can be said of the stunning watercolor works on joss paper by Dusti Bongé, a self-taught modernist painter from Biloxi, Mississippi, Longino’s birth city. Bongé’s pieces, Untitled (1991, 1984, 1987), refer to “ghost” or “spirit” money, symbolic currency burned in East Asian religious ceremonies, particularly those related to ancestor worship and spiritual rituals.
 
Longino’s “entity” further takes shape in Anna Bella Geiger’s video Passagens 1 (1974), in which the artist drifts, climbs, and paces without apparent direction. Shot in black and white on a Sony Portapak near her home in Rio de Janeiro during Brazil’s military dictatorship, the scenes evoke another Robertson proverb: “As she drifts, she hums a little tune. What is that tune?” Further afield, the movement of the human body through space is echoed in Sydney Schrader’s five striking Untitled (2025) oil paintings on linen, where a person assumes various poses “inspired by visions of a figure in an indeterminate space.” The power of these paintings contrasts with Emil (2025), a stainless-steel sculpture by Schrader, which embodies fragility and instability, suspended as it is from a single screw in the wall. Equally enigmatic, Rosemarie Castoro’s Sarcophagus Self-Portrait (1994), also in stainless steel, traces the contours of a silhouette emerging from the wall, epitomizing the passenger-like force that Longino and co-organizers strived to incorporate.
 
Linda Semadeni’s a feeling, a feeling, a feeling, a feeling (2025) closes the exhibition with five hundred drawings created using felt pens, gouache, acrylic, ink, pencil, colored pencil, markers, stickers, and more. The drawings include the handwritten phrase “I Am Not a Nice Girl” at times manipulated in order and meaning with added words such as “hot.” The language clashes and reverberates, creating a cacophony of inner sound and emotion that, while playful and pop, feels almost smothering in contrast to the subdued tone that preceded it.
 
There is much to be said about Longino’s inquisitiveness toward the waning of a woman’s reproductive life, vis-à-vis his own grappling with illness. While the show is not explicitly about women, it does posit a sense of metaphysical continuity. Like Robertson’s “ruin,” Longino’s “entity” offers a new foundation based on empowerment and a refusal to conform to conventions and constraints. His playful fictional experimentation resembles literary autofiction—which is to say that it is a work of truth not disguised as invention, but it is that invention. Needless to say, this underwriting would not be possible without the kindred imagination of the co-organizers, who received a unique request under extraordinary circumstances. Philosopher of her own Ruin proposes a unique encounter with the body in which, in the words of Longino, “these new entities demand more from the lives they lead before, as they offer an alternative interpretation of necessity.”