New Anatomies
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.
Images of heroes have long been cast in bronze, often mounted on horseback and placed on pedestals 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 then debated: Should we immortalize our heroines there or demonstratively leave the pedestals unoccupied to draw attention to the untold stories of unknown heroines?
Rarely does a woman find herself enshrined as a statue, and when she does, it is most often as a reclining muse, admired not for her (heroic) deeds but for her beauty. While heroines are already barely visible—underrepresented 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 which have brought 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 the tristesse of our small-town identities. We didn‘t have a vocabulary to describe our otherness. We used images of bodies and gestures to compare reality with ourselves and what we saw in the mirror. 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.
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. For us, this image seems 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.