Artist Residency 10.2.-10.3. 2025
Nirox Art Foundation South Africa
Exhibtion 8.-16.3.2025
Villa Legodi South Africa
Residency in collaboration with the University of Johannesburg, Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture (UJ FADA), Jewellery Department and FADA Gallery.
See more:
Villa Legodi Exhibition
Villa Legodi – Photo-Exhibition 

Martina Dempf is a Berlin-based jewellery artist and social anthropologist. Her research focuses on indigenous and modern body-related cultural art and translates it into contemporary jewellery. One of her central points of enquiry relates to technical skills and mystic beliefs of ancient cultures, and whether there is a continuity into our era of the Anthropocene, and Artificial Intelligence.

During her residency, Dempf immersed herself within the ecology of the residency space, and its surrounds, collecting natural materials in the park. Investigating the agency of the materials collected, Dempf transformed woods, roots, seeds etc, combining them with materials like metal, glass, stone or hair, metamorphosing them into wearable art-objects, imbued with new connotations.
Mastering Disaster – Nature and Fiction, is largely driven by Dempf’s fascination with the cultural histories of metaphysical protection of the human body and its environment, and how this universal need for preservation translates into physical objects. The consideration of materials within Dempf’s practice seeks to urge a haptic experience with the viewer, in which her amulets, necklaces, pendants, brooches, rings, and sculptural objects embed her practice within the histories of artisans and crafts-workers, and the legacies of knowledge in working largely by hand.
Tristin, Roland, Curator Nirox