approaching burning bodies
feuerfluss
it is difficult to define the work of Penelope Wehrli. Is it installation or performance? Wehrli’s work lives between these fields.
Wehrli installs 11 rafts with shirt sculptures on a river. the 11 oversized shirts made of wax covered fabric have texts written on them by 11 women who are of different nationalities and have lived in different periods.
They have two things in common: writing and voluntary death.
Subject of the women’s texts is the wish to annihilate their body.
They describe this body from a distanced view, as if it was something foreign, as if they were dissecting it. From this alienated view the body turns into material.
The writing moves itself away from the body.
The cause for this estrangement is the influence of exterior violence: a violence which means unbearable pain. The estrangement makes it possible to survive the pain for the moment, but the body keeps calling back. The violence forced upon the body from the outside, writes itself onto the body and makes the body the carrier of this violence and the site of the pain. The body itself now acts violently towards the woman who is estranged from it. The body reminds her of the pain again and again and lures her into it.
These women are left powerless by the violence, both from outside as from the violence within their bodies. Powerless they freeze.