CROSSINGS I, 2019
Akademie der Bildenden Kunste Wien
Crossings is a series of works in sandcast and blown glass touching upon bodies, their movement and memory. A pair of transparent cookies are tracking the reflections of visitors upon a notation inscribed on their tray at the entrance.Two pair of feet are found in the space, one is tied up with conductive copper, one is free, tracing memories of movements as well as the impossibility to move. A glass blown bubble made from the breath of the glassblower contains the remains of the first history book written by Herodotus, Histories, washed in the washing machine, in an attempt to let go of history, to be done with the past, or to ask oneself who controls / who writes history and who has the rights and tools to do so.
CROSSINGS I, 2019
Akademie der Bildenden Kunste Wien
Crossings II is another series discussing politics of movement in the crossings of liquids crystallizing into solid matter, here mainly ink, lead and glass.
A cast of teeth is made out of lead, a toxic material historically used for plumbing, its chemical symbol (Pb) standing for Plumbum. In the Austro-German tradition of Bleigießen, Molybdomancy, lead serves as a predictive medium whose molten shapes, when cast into water on the night before New Year’s Eve - are able to foretell the year’s events. Here it has been used for the cast of a closed female mouth, my own – implying an arrest in the flows of breath and voice. Weaponizing lead as the medium of the control of flows of waste, it’s a visual counterpart to Anne Carsons’ analysis of patriarchal cultures’ project of ‘putting a door on the female mouth and ideologically associating the female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death’. The female mouth is here reduced to toxic materiality and flow control, with the breath and voice imagined here only as leaks.
In the screenprint the female body appears in the form of a classical sculpture, having suffered multiple attacks within a warzone. Its image is reproduced here in repeated, overlayered printing, rendered in fractured halftones – in a reenactment of trauma through the mechanical reproduction apparatus. The leaks of ink organized systemically through the screenprint generate a cartography of the historical violence on the female body, mapped like conquered territory.
In the two sandcasted copies of feet, situated within a black A4 paper holder, the work argues that the bodys’ ability to move is entirely dictated by its legibility within an administrative filing system, documentation, and legal taxonomies. Cast in sand, they carry the materiality and burden of coastal checkpoints, in a crossing apparently arrested by the states’ mechanisms and infrastructure. Their transparency rendered dark by the technological system they lay upon turns their visibility dependent upon the legibility machine, deciding whose body is visible and whose is rendered into a ghost.
In those works, glass, ink and lead become crystallized, amputated fragments of a body – cut off from its fluidity and freedom of movement within pre-digital technological, flattening devices. By exposing this capturing of life into arrested matter, they implicitely call towards a politics of the leak.