Agatha Wara
BLONDES SANS BRUNETTE
28/05/2026—27/06/2026
A history of the sticker. In 1935 stickers were invented. Glue-backed little pieces of paper with the ability to be stuck.
To stickwas de-verbed, it went from action to noun: a small object defined entirely by its function. The sticker sticks and stucks, re-sticks and re-stucks. Objects that don’t obey a stable tense, as their attachment is never fully final, like staples or nails. “The sticker” should describe the person who is sticking, as in the baker who bakes. But the “one who sticks,” is a human profession that never stuck, and there is no “the one who sticks.” The sticker hides the doer of the sticking: stickers get stuck by an invisible presence. The doer disappeared. The doer was replaced by a type of adhesive.
Without the adhesive the sticker is just a curvaceous piece of paper. Without the backing sheet it is an object indiscriminately unattached. The sticker needs the sticker sheet. It is the holding system that prepares the sticker for visibility, it is a site of anticipation, a green room that suspends the sticker in a pre-state. On it, the sticker is anticipatorily unstuck, discreetly lying in wait. What separates it from tape, a good question, is its face. A sticker is a pre-individuated image-object, it is an individual body waiting to be peeled from its stage.
As a temporary architecture the sticker sheet is rather flimsy. When all of the stickers are lifted off the sheet it is a surface made of sticker-shaped absences. What was once an existence plane, the sticker sheet now reveals itself incapable of autonomy. Alone the sticker sheet cannot self-support. It was always meant to disappear. A discardable infrastructure, die-cut debris.
Agatha Wara is a Bolivia-born, America-raised artist working across sculpture, installation, moving image, and performance. Her practice centers on staging as a structural condition, understanding the stage as a site that authorizes visibility. Materials that carry cultural excess—celebrity images, plush alpacas, fragments of pop music—are subjected to measured interventions that reduce them to surface, orientation, and system. Across these works, meaning and value oscillate between excess and systems of control.
Wara has presented projects in a range of institutional and independent contexts, including the National Museum of Norway, Reykjavík Art Museum, WIELS Project Room (Brussels), Etablissement d’en face (Brussels), Mecènes du Sud (Montpellier), Mae West Gallery (Lausanne), Centralbanken (Oslo), and
Dismagazine.com
(New York). Her traveling musical/film project,
Foyote Cugly, is currently touring Europe. Wara lives and works in Oslo and is represented by the gallery Damien & the Love Guru in Brussels and Zurich.
