| | | | | | | | Ulrike Ottinger
Das Geheimnis der Madame X (Tabea Blumenschein)
Kontext: Madame X – Eine absolute Herrscherin, Insel Mainau, 1977
© Ulrike Ottinger | | | | | NEW ANATOMIES | | | | invited by Sara-Lena Maierhofer and Flo Maak | | | | | | | 19 March – 16 April 2022 | | | | Vernissage: Saturday, 19 March, 11am - 6pm | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Maria Sturm
Untitled, 2021
Pigment Print, gerahmt, 30 x 40 cm | | | | | | The group exhibition New Anatomies is centered around Ulrike Ottinger's „Das Geheimnis der Madame X (Tabea Blumenschein)“ from 1977. Based on this iconic photograph, Sara-Lena Maierhofer and Flo Maak have selected works by fellow artists that relate to different aspects of Ottinger's work and contribute their own perspectives on identity, gender, body and desire.
"I wish to escape from a crystallised identity..."
Josephine de Collage (Yvonne Rainer) in „Madame X. Eine absolute Herrscherin“, 1977
Images of heroes have long been cast in bronze, often placed on a horse and raised on a pedestal so that future generations would remember the achievements of these men. Some of these supposed heroes have been pushed from their thrones and turned into scrap metal. Many still await their fall. What to do with the vacated pedestals is being debated. Should we immortalize our heroines there or demonstratively leave the pedestals unoccupied to draw attention to the untold stories of unknown heroines? | | | | | | | | | Laura Schawelka
Untitled (Bracelet), 2019
PVC, Metall, gesamt ca. 183 x 425 cm übereck,
PVC allein 183 x 245 cm, Metallgitter jeweils 183 x 60 cm | | | | | | Rarely does a woman find herself enshrined as a statue, and when she does, it is more as a reclining muse, admired not for her (heroic) deeds but for her beautiful being. While heroines are already barely visible - in public space as well as in museums and history books - non-binary and trans-identitary figures in history are virtually invisible. There is also a lack of adequate representation for the memory of the collective movements to which we owe visibility, participation, and freedom in the choice of partners, professions, and identities.
For those born in the 1980s, like us, pop culture figures in the 1990s allowed us to break out of our small-town identity tristesse. We didn't have a vocabulary to describe our otherness. We used images of bodies and gestures to compare reality with ourselves and our mirror images. Later, we came across Judith Butler's texts, which, for all their intellectual overload, provided us with a vocabulary for our struggles with constraining role models. | | | | | | | | | Sara-Lena Maierhofer
Untitled, 2021
Fotogramm, 24 x 30 cm | | | | | | Today, our generation, as well as those who came before and after us, have a broader repertoire of images, gestures, and vocabularies that allow us to confidently occupy public spaces and to more boldly and imaginatively envision alternative ways of living. We write this knowing the fragile social gains and our own privileges in times of neo-fascist movements that like to pin the decline of civilization on the imagined "gender panic".
The photographic work "Das Geheimnis der Madame X" by Ulrike Ottinger depicts Tabea Blumenschein as a doubled heroine with tensed biceps and adorning chest hair. The image seems to us like a message in a bottle; sent in 1977 and arrived in the present to defend as superheroine the achievements of the last decades. With New Anatomies we are sending our own message in a bottle. The contributions to this exhibition fill the empty pedestals with their own narratives, dissecting traditional role models and developing alternative figurations of material and gender from these fragments.
Flo Maak and Sara-Lena Maierhofer | | | | | | | | | Latefa Wiersch
Die Muse, 2013,
Video, 2:31min (still) | | | | | | unsubscribe here
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