London
Cosima von Bonin’s “Upstairs Downstairs” (on view through December 14, 2025) registered largely as slapstick excess at its crowded opening: a parade of oversize stuffed cartoon toys and theatrical props feeding the evening’s social dramatics. Walking through the exhibition alone some weeks later, the mood shifted as the humor folded into something more melancholic, even sinister. von Bonin’s cartoon animals—perched on swings, slumped at school desks, hung from ropes, and posed on stage-like white platforms—now appeared lethargic, alienated, and abandoned.
With the addition of spotlights, mic stands, and other elements recalling a studio set, von Bonin conjures a psychological theater of childhood. This formative arena, in which the Freudian ego, id, and superego begin to take shape, is also when the self’s relationship to discipline, desire, taboo, and social norms is first rehearsed. The props of childhood double as metaphors for adult taboos and interpersonal economies. Recurring motifs of discipline and punitive authority—school desks, chairs, and prison bars—stand in for the early internalization of authority and the fantasies of escape that such systems inevitably produce.
Across three floors, von Bonin’s stuffed toys are staged in absurdist scenes of domination and submission. A killer whale with coquettish eyelashes mounts a rhino whose horn is wrapped in red leather. Three white cartoon bodies—drained of color in a deliberate gesture toward anonymity—are suspended from the ceiling and entangled in a kinky rope-play of ambiguous roles. A melancholy purple whale sits alone on a swing with a meticulously crafted silver handbag, gazing at a silvery hip flask perched out of reach on a mantelpiece. In a narrow room, a monumental Pinocchio figure made of wood, stone, and fiberglass bends forward with backside raised both teasingly and awkwardly, its elongated nose disappearing into the wall as if into a glory hole. Its mouth gapes wide open in a frozen expression of shock or surprise.
Elsewhere, von Bonin’s grammar turns darker. A sleek red-and-white missile sculpture dominates an entire gallery, while a giant, eerily humanoid stuffed chicken looks on, the reddish stain on its chest recalling blood more than vomit. An ambient electronic soundtrack co-created with Moritz von Oswald loops in the background of the scene, deepening the atmosphere of unease.
Progressing through the exhibition’s intimately scaled rooms, it struck me how this cast of characters lends itself perfectly to meme culture and the “relatability” economy (“that’s such a mood,” “that’s so me”) of lethargy, burnout, horniness, cringe, and self-irony. The cartoon figures, at times stripped of color and/or facial detail, become empty templates—anonymous, interchangeable surfaces ready for projection. von Bonin indulges and critiques this mechanism. By hollowing out the specificity of her characters, she mirrors a culture in which emotion is outsourced to stock expressions and circulating tropes, making visible the semiotic emptiness underpinning contemporary economies of identification.
This critique extends to consumer culture and the art world’s fetishization of access. Luxury items—Hermès shawls, Yves Saint Laurent shopping bags, Louis Vuitton fabrics—tied messily around the necks of the stuffed figures or stitched and pinned into wall-based fabric works, undermine their supposed preciousness and, by extension, the sanctity of the art object. In one of the downstairs galleries, visitors are invited through a simple installation of two freestanding white doors: an illusion of “entry” and a cathartic threshold, positioned opposite a red sign on the wall that reads “private.” Together, they turn the art world’s choreography of exclusivity into a deadpan, comedic flop.
von Bonin’s installations, which combine found objects and handmade elements, retain a deliberate looseness aligned with her Cologne milieu of the 1990s—an anti-heroic sensibility that dismantles the cult of authorship, authenticity, and artistic genius. Her stuffed characters expose the clownish, failure-prone comedy symptomatic of alienated contemporary subjecthood, where compulsive performativity and endless self-presentation obscure a fundamental, often desperate, desire for connection and recognition.