NYAB Event - Heide Hatry "Heads and Tales"

Heide Hatry "Heads and Tales"

Elga Wimmer PCC

This event has ended.

Elga Wimmer PCC announces an exhibition and book release party for Heads and Tales by Heide Hatry, in conjuction with readings, talks and book signings.

The portraits in Heads and Tales are photographic documentations of sculptures created by German artist Heide Hatry out of animal skin and body parts. They consist of untreated pigskin over a clay armature with raw meat for lips and fresh pig eyes.

The book is a collaborative anthology consisting of Hatry's images and stories by twenty-seven prominent and emerging authors who were charged with giving lives to Hatry's creations.

The portrait of a face staring into the camera or captured in a snapshot doesn't normally conjure thoughts of death, in fact quite the opposite, even though we are often, in reality, looking at the living image of the dead when we view a photograph. Every photograph is a memento mori, but as we prefer to forget that reminder of death, we are easily persuaded that these images, too, represent real, living people.

Hatry intended her sculptures to provide springboards for stories, reminiscences or meditations on the lives of women. She asked a number of female writers to select the image of one of her women and create a life for her. As the visual work addresses issues of violence, death and gender identity, the writing reflects similar concerns as they are specific to women, not necessarily from an obviously politically fraught or polemical perspective, but more typically resorting to fantasy, satire, irony and other subversive modes of presentation to disrupt the hegemony of the everyday and release the power of its horror. In her introduction to the book, renowned feminist theorist Catharine MacKinnon remarks, "Finding a way to be a woman is finding a way to live with fatal knowledge." Hatry has a penchant for difficult subjects that press directly against mortality, fear and alienation. Her sculptures speak the fatal knowledge that others are at pains to suppress.

Media

• Photography

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