BURQA EX CARNE (from the series Human Fragility)

BURQA EX CARNE appears as a monumental and unsettling presence, a figure entirely enveloped in a drapery that simulates the texture of flesh, placed within the museum space as a solid apparition, at once static and vulnerable. The burqa, traditionally an instrument of concealment and protection, is here transformed into a carnal surface, an extruded skin, a corporeal fabric rendered into sculptural matter. No longer cloth but flesh, no longer veil but exposed body, it inverts the original function of the religious garment: to conceal becomes to reveal, to protect becomes to expose to fragility.

The choice of materials is decisive. Resin, stable and cold, is opposed to the organic evocation of flesh conveyed by ballistic gel, a substance designed to absorb bullets and simulate human vulnerability. Their coexistence generates a semantic short circuit. The sculpture is body and simulacrum, relic and fetish, armor and wound. It is a body clothed in itself, transformed into both an object of sacrifice and a monument to anthropological fragility.

On a conceptual level, BURQA EX CARNE functions as a socio cultural threshold. The religious garment, a symbol of belonging but also of distance, is reimagined as flesh, producing a visual and symbolic conflict that reflects the clash between cultures. Where the burqa offers protection and an expression of faith, its translation into flesh exposes it to vulnerability and rejection. Weik articulates a reflection on sacrifice and misunderstanding: when a religion encounters a society that does not accept it, the result is a fracture that generates conflict, stigmatization, and marginalization.

The verticality of the sculpture, the height of a human body, forces a direct encounter with the viewer, who faces an icon without a face, a presence that is simultaneously individual and collective, faith and anonymity. The void of the eye opening acts as a black hole that absorbs the gaze, evoking both the absence of a recognized identity and the difficulty of a genuine intercultural dialogue.

BURQA EX CARNE is not a religious object but a critical device that translates into sculptural form the fracture between faith and society, between the desire for protection and the exposure to sacrifice. In this sense, the work belongs to a genealogy of contemporary art that confronts the body as a field of political, anthropological, and symbolic tension. Weik constructs an icon of conflict: a faceless body, veiled in flesh, becoming a powerful image of human fragility in a time when religion manifests itself as clash and incomprehension.