For many years now, Niina Lehtonen Braun has been exploring, through her collages and paintings, women as part of a generational chain, the various roles associated with womanhood, and the expectations and attributions that go hand in hand with them. Through her own personal themes, the exhibition and the art book offer a sensitive entry point for others and an opportunity to delve into questions surrounding the female body. The book is intended as alternative explorations of femininity and present a different narrative to that practised by medicine for many years, which was primarily based on the male body and thus paid little attention to the specific characteristics of the female body.

The artist comments: “I am interested in how knowledge that was once barely accessible can now be shared and reinterpreted – particularly with regard to the female body. Women’s health issues were long a marginal topic in medicine; awareness has since shifted. My work sees itself as a link between this shift and the legacy of exclusion – I translate shame and anger into visual imagery.”

The result is a dense web of narratives, images and associations. Found materials, newspaper clippings, photographs, an animated film and drawings are fused together with paintings to form a whole that paints a multi-layered and moving picture of what it means to be a woman, a girlfriend, a mother or a daughter. The book is accompanying the exhibition curated by Dr. Christine Nippe at Kunstverein Schwarz'sche Villa in Berlin Steglitz (14.5.-27.9.2026).