There is a beauty brand currently circulating in Berlin that looks, at first glance, entirely real. Its products include a hammer anatomically designed for jawline bone-smashing, a crucifix shampoo for demonically split ends, and a tasteful Ozempic storage stand, because, as the copy goes, only poor people put their Ozempic in the freezer. The Ivana Vladislava beauty exhibition Inner Beauty is for Ugly People is the occasion for all of this, and the fake brand is its opening gambit, a warning shot dressed in the livery of something you might actually buy.
Vladislava has been at this for a while. Born in Poland and raised in the post-communist 1990s, she moved to Berlin at 14, eventually becoming an artist and fixture of the city’s queer scene, with her own body as one of her most legible works. She calls her aesthetic ‘post-communism wealth’, a phrase that captures something real about the logic of excess: why settle for one thing when you can have the whole fantasy? The problem is that the fantasy has a way of consuming the person chasing it. By her own account, Vladislava pursued surgical transformation until she ended up ‘completely disfigured’. She describes herself now as ‘a prisoner in a self-made hell of silicone and lip filler’, someone who got surgery to look better and use less make-up, only to need more make-up than ever to cover the scars.
The Ivana Vladislava beauty exhibition and the logic of the scam
That personal history is not incidental to the show; it is the engine of it. Vladislava is not a dispassionate cultural critic arriving at beauty from the outside. She is, as she puts it, a consumer herself, damaged by the system and now depending on it more than ever. What the fake brand does is externalise that dependency into something you can hold, and laugh at, and then catch yourself half-believing in anyway. She frames this directly: ‘Some say beauty is a scam. But am I a scammer if my scam is the most honest of them all?’
The products are deliberately, almost philosophically, absurd. A Marlbotox Ashtray, for resting your syringe during a Botox party. A Looksmaxxing Hammer. A Crucifix Shampoo. What makes them work as critique is not that they are obviously impossible but that they are only one or two degrees of irony away from things that already exist. The Ozempic storage stand is, in its way, a precise mirror of how the weight-loss injection has been aestheticised and class-coded in real life. ‘It proves that we never buy a product,’ Vladislava says; ‘we buy a good story.’
The deeper point, and the one the exhibition keeps circling, is that beauty has become a class system that now runs in reverse. Once, a surgically altered face was the ultimate status symbol, obtainable only by the wealthy. Now, with surgery available on instalment payments and promo codes, the ‘Istanbul nose and teeth Insta-face package,’ as Vladislava puts it, has become a marker of the proletariat. The rich have pivoted back to natural faces. Plastic looks cheap; natural looks rich. The system has completed its circuit.
What the gallery walls hold
Inner Beauty is for Ugly People runs at Robert Grunenberg, a gallery in Berlin, until 3 September. According to Artsy, the gallery is located at Kantstraße 147 in Berlin, which places it in Charlottenburg, a neighbourhood whose Cold War history of Western performance and window-dressing is not entirely irrelevant to Vladislava’s themes. The exhibition is the fake brand’s reveal, the point at which the opening act drops its mask and the full scope of the work becomes visible.
Vladislava is not, she insists, interested in giving another lecture about why beauty is bad. What she wants to observe is how much, as she says, ‘bullshit we’re willing to buy if it’s packaged well enough.’ The answer the beauty industry keeps providing is: quite a lot. She extends this into a broader anthropology: ‘We are still primaeval beings; we just switched witches for plastic surgeons and fortune-tellers for ChatGPT.’ The reference point she reaches for is Hannibal Lecter, via Thomas Harris: ‘We begin by coveting what we see every day.’ Desire, in this reading, is not aspirational; it is merely contagious.
The question she leaves open is what happens when everyone achieves the standard. ‘If everyone can be pretty, where’s the fun in being pretty?’ she asks. Beauty is only legible against its opposite. If the industry ever succeeded in its stated mission, she argues, it would simply pivot to selling ugliness, which, she notes, worked perfectly well for fashion. The show runs until 3 September.
