"Urban Prayers" by Silke Lapina – Text by Paula Dengs 2022

Urban Prayers is a series of works of art that combine pop culture and spirituality. The GermanFilipino artist Silke Lapina deals with the relevance of religion and spirituality in today's world. All of the works in the exhibition revolve around sanctifying the every day or recognizing the sacred in the mundane. As a birthplace of musical ideas, a music studio in Berlin Friedrichshain provides the setting for the Urban Prayers exhibition.

The hand-engraved mirror pieces feature quotes from urban pop and rap songs, which are reminiscent of medieval prayer verses. Here Lapina combines her pop cultural influences with the theme of spirituality today. The viewers perceive themselves in a mirror while reading the reflection of a quote. Self-observation while reading underscores the works’ reception and, through associative engagement with the duality of sacred and obscene, can alter the perception as well as promote self-knowledge. She uses a seemingly mundane setting - the mirror - as a portal or stage, with each piece functioning as its own narrative microcosm in search of deeper existential meanings. The mirrors create meaningful and nuanced connections between the identity of song lyrics that fill our daily lives and their associative and narrative power. Each of us has experienced a song that touches you, one that accompanies you for days. These "urban prayers", as Lapina calls them, act like a mantra in our heads. She translates this earworm into a visual work of art - the Urban Prayers.

In addition to the mirror works, the exhibition shows a portion of the series of works titled Icons. In this series, both profane and spiritual symbols are laid in gold leaf on vivid color gradients. The fascination of icons is timeless, they are the symbol of a devout and profound spiritual expression and have long remained untouched by modernization. Nevertheless, the symbolism that permeates icons does not cease to fascinate and touch even today.

Perhaps it is precisely the speed of our times, in which everything is changing and seemingly losing its point of reference, that makes the revival of a specific iconography all the more necessary. It is more a reflection of one's own life than a purely artistic expression. In her works, the artist follows the tradition of icon painting, a practice that she feels is like meditation, but at the same time transforms it into modernity. Unlike in classical icon painting, Lapina uses variants of color gradients as a background, which intensifies the symbolism of the icons and refers to today's pop culture. The color gradients are reminiscent of light shows by musicians such as The Weekend, where the artist is perceived as almost a preacher or a saint. Picking up on certain symbols like the virgin Mary is not a frivolous choice, but a metaphor that plays with its symbolic history and offers insight into the kind of conversation that is active in this work. The title Mariayou know you are my lover, derived from the song Maria by Santana, plays with pop culture influences to create a new relevance for the icon. Traditional and modern symbols congregate in these vibrant canvases. Old and new stories are interwoven, thus inviting us to a fresh look at old yet contemporary themes.