Neanderthal Beauty Clinic
Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design•Oct 24, 2025 — Feb 22, 2026
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“Neanderthal Beauty Clinic” is a gallery exhibition that presents a speculative beauty installation created by Madlen Hirtentreu and Darja Popolitova, through which the artists reflect on how beauty procedures have become consumable quick commodities, revealing how activities marketed as self-care can conceal mechanisms of bodily control and subjugation.
Hirtentreu’s and Popolitova’s installation presents an aesthetic laboratory with an undefined temporal origin. It is partly a shrine, partly a clinic, where medical and cosmetic objects intertwine – everything from nail soakers, bootyshakers, gaze amplifiers and body triggers – as well as animal-derived artefacts and materials like silver, charcoal, and stone, all of which appear to be part of an attempt to invent yet another absurd beauty procedure promising eternal youth for the body. Through the materials used, the artists highlight the invasive methods and almost unattainable standards employed in the pursuit of beauty a…
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Neanderthal Beauty Clinic
Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design•Oct 24, 2025 — Feb 22, 2026
Press Release
“Neanderthal Beauty Clinic” is a gallery exhibition that presents a speculative beauty installation created by Madlen Hirtentreu and Darja Popolitova, through which the artists reflect on how beauty procedures have become consumable quick commodities, revealing how activities marketed as self-care can conceal mechanisms of bodily control and subjugation.
Hirtentreu’s and Popolitova’s installation presents an aesthetic laboratory with an undefined temporal origin. It is partly a shrine, partly a clinic, where medical and cosmetic objects intertwine – everything from nail soakers, bootyshakers, gaze amplifiers and body triggers – as well as animal-derived artefacts and materials like silver, charcoal, and stone, all of which appear to be part of an attempt to invent yet another absurd beauty procedure promising eternal youth for the body. Through the materials used, the artists highlight the invasive methods and almost unattainable standards employed in the pursuit of beauty a…
