POLE ANIMALS
Photography · Body Paint · Pole Dance
Research from 2020–2025
Expo. Booklaunch
Beamstreet Studio Antwerp, September 2025
Pole Animals is a photographic series in which Sarina Mannaert fuses make-up, body paint, pole dance and photography into one fluid artistic language. Created in close collaboration with professional pole dancers, fellow artist Sarie Verheughe and a circle of creative collaborators, the project explores how discipline, movement and identity intersect through the body.
The figures depicted appear suspended between human and animal. Almost mythical, yet undeniably physical, they are captured at moments of extreme control and concentration. The pole remains the only tangible anchor, a reminder that these transformations are rooted in technique, strength and embodied knowledge, rather than costume or fiction.
Each pose originates from an existing pole technique, often named after an animal for the specific movement it evokes. Through this translation, Pole Animals visualises power, technique and playfulness while questioning how certain disciplines remain marginalised despite their technical and artistic depth.
Rather than a manifesto, Pole Animals is an offering:
a space between imagination and identity, between visibility and recognition, between skin, movement and stillness.
FROM MASK TO HUMAN – IS MAKE-UP ART?
Make-up · Live performance
FOMU Antwerp · Ensornacht 2024
During Ensornacht 2024 at FOMU Antwerp, Sarina Mannaert presented From Mask to Human . Is Make-Up Art?
A live performance centred on transformation and visibility.
Inspired by the work of Cindy Sherman, the performance examined identity through the act of make-up itself.
The piece began with an exaggerated Hollywood-style persona, echoing Sherman’s cinematic characters, and gradually evolved into a second Cindy Sherman figure: the clown. Through the visible application and removal of make-up, the audience witnessed a process that typically unfolds backstage, unseen, fleeting and rarely recognised as artistic labour.
By placing the making process at the centre of the performance, Mannaert questioned why make-up continues to be perceived primarily as a service, even when its artistic complexity is widely acknowledged. The performance claimed make-up as an autonomous art form, requiring time, craftsmanship and physical presence.
STANDING ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS
(original title: Op Reuzenschouders)
Expo . Photography . Performance
Dendermonde Public Library, 2022
Katuit, 2023
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants reinterprets local tradition through a contemporary, feminist lens. Inspired by the historic giants of Dendermonde, Sarina Mannaert asks a simple but disruptive question: what if tradition looked different?
Drawing from the well-known phrase attributed to Isaac Newton, the project acknowledges tradition as a foundation rather than a constraint. By reimagining the city’s iconic giants as female figures, the work challenges who is allowed to embody strength, visibility and heritage.
All central figures and collaborators involved in the project are women born or living in Dendermonde, often underrepresented locally, yet with established practices beyond the city’s borders. Through photography and performance, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants honours their presence while questioning the gendered narratives embedded in cultural rituals.
In 2023, the project extended beyond the exhibition space: for the first time in the city’s history, female figures inspired by the project officially opened the Katuit Parade. What began as a photographic reinterpretation became part of a living tradition. The project is both homage and intervention, building on tradition while daring to reshape it.
A MODERN PAINTER
Solo exhibition
Photography . Bodypaint . Make-up
Dendermonde.
Bakermat, 2017
A Modern Painter marked Sarina Mannaert’s first solo exhibition and laid the foundations of her artistic practice. In this early body of work, make-up and body paint were approached not as preparation for an image, but as the image itself.
Treating the body as a canvas, the exhibition explored the intersection between painting, photography and make-up. The works oscillate between portraiture and abstraction, questioning authorship, craft and the position of make-up within visual art.
A Modern Painter already articulated a recurring theme in Mannaert’s practice: making visible an art form that traditionally remains backstage, and claiming space for make-up as an autonomous artistic language.
