Leonie Brandner, Müge Yılmaz, and Pei-Ying Lin
By a Woman,
Curated by Marjolein van der Loo
Graphic design by Studio Yannick Nuss
By a Woman, is the next chapter in the evolving series A Tree, with a Bird, by a Woman, on Land, Under a Star. This exhibition explores "worlding"—the act of imagining, shaping, and manifesting worlds—through the embodied, intuitive, and speculative practices of women artists. At its core lies a belief in feminist storytelling as a tool for re-envisioning knowledge, ecology, and power.
Why a woman? Why foreground gender at all? Perhaps the woman in the title is the maker of the work, the narrator of the story, or a shapeshifter moving between identities of each iteration. She is someone whose ways of knowing have historically been overlooked, dismissed, or excluded. The exhibition takes these questions as an invitation to reconsider who gets to imagine worlds, whose knowledge is recognized, and how stories shape the realities we inhabit. The project approaches "woman" as an open, relational, and politically situated category, in solidarity with trans, non-binary, and gender-fluid people, and attentive to the ways identities are lived, negotiated, and continually becoming.
By a Woman, begins from the understanding that worlds are continually shaped through relationships between people, materials, stories, and more-than-human life. The exhibition approaches artistic practice as a form of worlding: a material, imaginative, and collaborative process through which different realities can be rehearsed, inhabited, and brought into being. Feminist perspectives offer ways of attending to forms of knowledge that are embodied, situated, and relational.
Across installation, sculptures, text, and textiles, three distinct yet deeply entangled practices unfold. Pei-Ying Lin works across microbiology, bio-art, and textile practice to explore interspecies coexistence. Her hand-knitted coronavirus reimagines an invisible organism at the human scale, transforming scientific visualization into an encounter that questions how fear, intimacy, and knowledge participate in worlding our relationships with the microbial world.
Leonie Brandner uses inherited linens, embroidery, stone, and language as living archives. Through careful acts of stitching and collecting, she connects family histories with deep geological time, showing how worlds are continuously woven through materials and memory.
Müge Yılmaz reimagines forgotten and imagined figures whose stories traverse history and the future. Her brightly coloured wooden sculptures propose feminist genealogies in which writing, science, and care become enduring technologies of world-making.
Publication:
By a Woman, extends beyond the exhibition into a publication of the same title, launched at the exhibition's finissage. Rather than documenting the exhibition, the reader forms a second site where the same research continues to unfold. The artistic worlds presented in the exhibition become the chapters of the publication, while the texts themselves inhabit the exhibition through books, excerpts, and acts of reading. Each artist enters into dialogue with a collaborating writer, allowing artworks and texts to develop alongside one another through a shared process of speculation, research, and exchange.
At Onomatopee—simultaneously exhibition space and publishing house—making and publishing become deeply entangled practices. The exhibition and publication evolve together through an ongoing dialogue between worlding and wording, where making, writing, reading, and exhibiting shape one another. Worlds emerge through encounters between artworks, texts, materials, artists, readers, and visitors, whose interpretations and imaginations become active participants in the process of worlding.
General opening hours:
September 26–December 20
Open every Friday, Saturday and Sunday between 12-5 PM
At Onomatopee
Public Program:
Exhibition opening
Friday, September 25, 2026
19:30–22:00 (doors open 19:00)
Free entrance + free drink
At Onomatopee
Exhibition Finissage & Book Launch
Friday, December 18, 2026
19:30–22:00 (doors open 19:00)
Free entrance + free drink
At Onomatopee
