Starting point for the lecture-performance are the voices, bodies, stories and presences (or rather absences) of women that are in the for- and backgrounds of some works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and George Condo.
Hurth creates a polyphonic interweaving of fictional, factual and subjective narratives and opens thus the terrain for her own feminist art historiography.
Playfully using the format of the guided tour, she confronts the several voices she adopted to the audience, embodying those and triggering thus notions of representation and portraiture.
Shall it be the women represented on the portraits, the one missing from collection, or artists and other women who have been accompanying her work throughout the past years, Hurth boldly confronts the visitors with the male-dominating mechanism of collecting in private and public collections.
Her system of appropriation is simple, she reworked quotes and material within her own writing, reading a loud while placing herself in relation to some chosen artworks, the name of the woman being voiced printed on the backside of the sign.
fernanda, olga, dora, lydia, lily and 95 more women
2017
Performance at the Museum Berggruen, Berlin (DE)
30 signs and three A3 posters
Length 60 minutes
Work published within Hagen Verleger’s Margaret van Eyck—Renaming an Institution, a Case Study (Volume Two: Comments, Contexts, and Connections)”