Text: Aziza Harmel, 2023

“I do remember when it occurred to me the first time, when I got the idea of painting the way I feel at a given moment. I was sitting in a chair and felt it pressing against me. I still have the drawings where I depicted the sensation of sitting.”

I could not discover when Maria Lassnig wrote this, but I thought it was such a beautiful way to articulate both, the tracking of a physical sensation and the emotional sensation of a physical experience. This idea to express the way the body and the world are intertwined is what this show is about. Through the work of Florine Imo, Maria Lassnig, Selma Selman and Barbara Hammer, we explore female memory, metamorphosis and self-depiction as tools to evoke the relationship between embodied histories and gender.

The artists in this exhibition explore existential questions about embodied knowledge, questions posed by the interaction between our body and the world. The stories and fragments of personal histories assembled by the artists reveal how histories, narratives, classifications, and categorisations work to contain us, to simplify us, to limit, control, and reduce us. But they also remind us how our bodies cannot help but resist this premature closure. They reassure us that we are sites of constant metamorphosis and in being such, that we can be the means to create many different worlds.

The themes of bodies, categorisation, and transformation are found in the work of American artist Barbara Hammer. In the abstract video No No Nooky T.V, Hammer explores human desire while cryptically describing a body that cannot be defined. Speaking on the work in an interview, the artist said “That is a film I did using the Amiga computer. It is fun. It is a really clear construction of the lesbian body and sexuality. I say the Lesbian body is holes and gaps and innuendoes and fringes and areas that are not defined. To me, we can’t be defined or won’t be defined as much as we try.” This focus on the impossibility of neatly defining gender identity is echoed in another of her video works, titled I was/I am. Quoting Maya Deren, an avant-garde filmmaker who she deeply admires, the work tells us how a “[w]oman is not committed to the natural chronology of her experience. On the contrary, she has access to all her experiences.” For me, this is a way of saying that the sections which seem to delineate the self we gradually become are not in fact linearly separated but rather coexist within our past, present, and future selves. While the video is explicitly divided into the two sections “I was” and “I am”, it nevertheless insists that her two selves coexist. It shows how she is a being of constant becomings with access to all her experiences. It reminds us that while we are often represented and treated as simple, singularly definitive creatures, we are in fact each hordes of selves that grow and communicate on a journey of infinite becoming.