(from the series KILL ME PLEASE!), 2024
iron, velvet, recycled beaver fur
210 x 240 cm
Transcription from the audio guide written by Alina Kleytman:
Once, these were principles.
But then She came.
The Diva.
The one who needs no name.
The principles tried to resist. They twitched, bent, clung to chains of logic, to the ceiling beams of dignity.
But the nerves—those red, velvety ones, like a ballerina’s flesh—couldn’t hold.
They tore. Inside out.
Now they hang. Dead, yet twitching.
Grotesquely twisted. Mutilated.
They look like something between a garden root and the stretched entrails of a lord caught sympathizing with the poor.
And all that remains of them is a plea:
“Kill me please.”
Description/commentary
In the series KILL ME PLEASE!, Alina Kleytman stages a grotesque masquerade of decadence and decay. The sculptural ensemble—writhing forms of iron cloaked in velvet and reclaimed beaver fur—suggests creatures caught mid-contortion, elegant and suffering. Their fleshy silhouettes and wiry appendages point to a hybrid of animal, object, and ornament, caught in an eternal pose of discomfort. KILL ME PLEASE! is both a plea and a performance: theatrical, absurd, and tragic. Kleytman’s hybrid bodies embody the contradictions of pleasure and pain, seduction and surrender, exploitation and excess. These are not passive objects, but witnesses—begging to be seen, touched, consumed, and ultimately destroyed.