D21/Spots: Transfigurations of MEDUSA

22 October 2021, 19:00 Performance

22 October 2021, 20:45 Artist Talk (mode­ra­ted by Constanze Müller)

Denise Blickhan has been deve­lo­ping her MEDUSA cycle sin­ce 2018; it cur­r­ent­ly com­pri­ses ele­ven sets of works, each using mul­ti-media per­for­mance, instal­la­ti­on, video, and sound. The cycle is con­stant­ly gro­wing. D21/Spots pres­ents the per­for­mance MEDUSA X (ico­no­clasms) which dis­cus­ses ques­ti­ons of power and iden­ti­ty through an ana­ly­sis of the glance cul­tures of social media.

Multiple levels over­load, over­char­ge and cumu­la­te to build a cri­ti­cal ana­ly­sis of the pre­sent day fema­le self- and exter­nal images. Denise Blickhan in her sound-based per­for­man­ces gene­ra­tes a claus­tro­pho­bic ego-cos­mos made of voice, body, lyrics and images. In the artist’s absence the spa­cious sta­ge instal­la­ti­on, in com­bi­na­ti­on with sound and video works, remain as per­for­ma­ti­ve relics in the exhi­bi­ti­on con­text. The space instal­la­ti­on Hierarchy invo­kes ques­ti­ons of the Beautiful and the Good. Soundscape Garden of Eden and the video pie­ce MEDUSA’s Head con­vey the emo­tio­nal set­ting of the per­for­mance as a psychi­cal land­s­cape into the exhi­bi­ti­on space.