Expanded Studio Project, Wysing Arts Centre, July 2013

Expanded Studio Project

Wysing Arts Centre 

March - July 2013

Erica Böhr engaged in dialogues with fellow Wysing studio artists Rob Smith, Alexandra Drysdale and Elena Cologni.

The project resulted in cross-pollination of ideas, themes and narratives, as well as more formal properties in the inter-practice exchanges. 

1. Rob Smith:  After a discussion about Rauschenberg erasure of one of de Kooning’s drawings (at Rauschenberg’s request), Rob gave Erica an original photograph, which she altered. Erica collaged a hyena and a space hopper onto Rob’s print of a Martian landscape, which he then reprinted as an new analogue photograph with the alterations and reinserted the new work into his photographic installation. 

"Hyena goes to Mars", 2013, altered analogue print

2. Erica’s response to one of Alexandra Drysdale’s mixed media sculptures resulted in ‘The Celestial Teapot Party’, an installation and interactive performance. 

Still from performance of "The Celestial Teapot Party",at Wysing Arts Centre, July 2013

Visitors are invited to sit on the chairs and have a discussion with the artist (when she is present, or among themselves.  Visitors are requested to choose one of the props on offer as they do so. 

The ‘celestial teapot’ references the philosopher Bertrand Russell’s notion of unfalsifiability (inability to disprove) of the existence of God.  He argued that it is as feasible that his assertion that there is a flying teapot in orbit between earth and Mars is true, as it too cannot be disproved. With reference to contemporary art practices that are framed by political concerns, Erica would argue that these approaches are themselves unfalsifiable, as they are rooted in the artist’s subjectivity.  It is this grey area of slippage and ambiguity in the work’s ‘meaning’ and its reception that is of interest to her.

3.  A prolonged discussion over 2 sessions with Elena Cologni, sharing 

narratives of motherhood, feminism and their lives growing up 

outside the UK, informed Erica’s digital print.  The work was inspired by a 

line taken from one of Elena’s catalogues, a stage direction for a 

performance ‘on a balcony sweeping the floor crying’, an incident 

recounted from Elena’s memories of an encounter with her mother in Milan where she grew up.

"ne Becomes a Woman", 2013, digital print

 Map designed and reprinted with permission by Lisa Wilkens

"The Hyena and the Alchemist", digital video, 2011

© Erica Böhr, 2011

"The Hyena and the Alchemist", a contemporary allegory

Erica Böhr

The Hyena and the Alchemist

A contemporary allegory

Degree Show Performance and Installation, 2011

CAST

(With thanks to Kate, Georgie, Jo, Ajay, Mandy, Vanessa, for three separate performances)

HYENA 1: Matriarch of the clan

HYENA 2: Matriarch’s sister

HYENA 3: Matriarch’s heavily pregnant sister

NARRATOR

ALCHEMIST: Umthakathi Mkhulu (the Great Wizard)

SANGOMA: The female diviner

VOICES 1, 2 and 3

IMPISI MHKULU: the Great Hyena Ur-ancestor, played by Hyena 1

The Hyena and the Alchemist will be performed for the first time at the Degree Show Private View at 7.30pm, on Thursday 2nd June 2011.

(English translation)

NARRATOR:   As the sun rises on the African Bushveld, north of the Tropic of Capricorn, we head to the apex where South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique meet at Crook’s Corner.  It is mid-summer and the temperature will soon rise to 39 degrees...

HYENA 1(interrupting):   Are you sure they need to know all of this?  This is supposed to be MY story, my moment of glory?

NARRATOR: OH MY GOD! I knew this would happen!  You ask me to collaborate, then you start your narcissistic shit again.  It’s always got to be about you, hasn’t it? Anyway, you’re coming into it soon.  So, where was I?  Ah, yes, it’s really, properly sweating-buckets-hot already, the air is crackling with the sound of cicadas and we have come upon three hyenas scavenging at a zebra kill...

HYENA 1 (interrupting again, angrily): SCAVENGING? SCAVENGING? Let me guess. You’re thinking the lions did it? Well, my friend, let me tell you something, We did it!  We hunted down and killed this fucking zebra ourselves!  I am so pissed off with this scavenging myth!  Hyenas actually hunt more than lions, but we get all the bad press.  

VOICE 1 (hissing):  Scavengers!

VOICE 2 (hissing):  Witches!

VOICE 3 (hissing):  Soul Stealers!

VOICE 1 (hissing):  Sorcerers!

VOICE 2 (hissing):  Creatures of the night!

VOICE 3 (hissing):  Always laughing...

VOICE 1 (hissing):  Cackling, Mad, Sneering

VOICE 2 (hissing):  Shape Shifters!

VOICE 3 (scathingly):  Generally loathsome.

"God, Guns and Gays", digital print, 2011

Abrahamic religions, especially fundamentalist versions thereof, threaten civil liberties.

In a utopian world where we could all just be...erm, gender liminal, say...then in an non-utopian way these religions would have to be dismantled!

I started by stealing bibles and recruiting like-minded thieves...taking evangelical materials out of circulation is a tiny, often unnoticed action, but amassing them and exhibiting them might make a difference!

After Chapman Brothers, After Goya

© Erica Böhr, 2011

"The Taxonomic Impossibilities of Liminality", 2011

I am primarily concerned with mapping liminality, that which is neither ‘here’ nor ‘there’.  To do this, I create alternative taxonomies by juxtaposing images and objects and inviting the viewer to form new narratives.  As part of this contemporary allegorical approach I use objects as ciphers for creating new sets of meaning.  I work across different media, including installation, sculpture, collage, video and performance.  My practice is grounded in research and enquiry and consequently language plays a pivotal role.  I attempt to activate my work by performing and setting up situations and performing actions.  The viewers’ participation is often invited in order to allow chance and randomness to affect the final piece of work.  The hyena and mercury function as critical ciphers in this current body of work as metaphors for alchemy, flux, dynamic change and gender liminality.

© Erica Böhr, 2011

The Encounter: Hyena Wizard

The Encounter

After the lengthy encounter with the three hyenas that day I returned to the camp at dusk.  The still night air was filled with the smell of the bushveld. The sound of the cicadas was accompanied by the cacophony of grunts, roars, and growls of larger animals stalking the periphery of the camp.  That night my dreams were filled by the hyena.  She paced and prowled through my dreamscapes, sniffing me out. She was so vivid and present, she was as close in my dreams as she had been that day. I woke at dawn, heart pounding, palms sweaty and shaking.  I headed barefoot out of the small rondawel, into the heat of the new day, out onto the fine red sand. I picked up a twig from underneath the umbrella thorn acacia tree, and reaching down I drew her, my dream companion, in the rising sun.  Alone and obsessed, I had soon drawn her, fresh from my dreams: 9 foot tall, snarling and ready, leering and sneering with her big open mouth, mammoth jaw and outsized fangs. 

That day was too hot to venture out again until late afternoon.  The February heat near the Mozambiquan border is monstrously oppressive. Everything is stripped of colour by the ferocity of the sun - white, blinding light.   I spent the day alone, lounging around the small rough cement pool in the camp, languid and thoughtful.  My hyena remained grinning in the sand in front of my hut, untouched.  There was no wind at all, just stifling relentless heat.

I became aware gradually that there was a slow but steady trickle of local Tsonga people some of whom I recognized from my time in the camp.  I had spoken with some of them in my rusty broken Zulu during my stay.  But something had changed.  They were circling me warily at the pool, whispering among themselves and pointing me out to the people they had brought with them.   No sooner had one small group left, then another arrived.  in twos or threes they came.  I was bewildered, as I had had pleasant dealings with the local employees in the camp in the previous week.

I returned to the hut before leaving for a last game drive.  As I walked across the sand to the door, I saw four women huddled around the side of my rondawel, pointing to my sand hyena and then pointing to me.  Hands over their mouths they were whispering among themselves and shaking their heads.  I smiled, recognizing one as Thembi who swept out the hut every day.  She didn't smile back but looked very scared and they hurried off.  Now I was really puzzled.  I assumed that the drawing must have some significance.  The next morning I went to the shop in the camp for milk, and managed to speak to Vusi, with whom I had had a few conversations in Zulu before.  He had been very surprised to hear that I spoke Zulu, as I told him I had come to Chingwedze from Cambridge on the day we arrived the previous week.  He too was very reluctant to talk to me that morning and he muttered something about the women being scared of the drawing, saying emphatically that "Tina Saba isimpisi gakhulu maningi." (We are very scared of the Hyena!)

I understood that bit, I was scared too!  I had spent three hours filming them at such close range the day before I could have touched their fur through the car window.  The hyena I had dreamt about had attacked the bumper!  She had been very protective of the heavily pregnant female who had been one of the three.  

After much coaxing, all I could get out of him was that I was now seen as dangerous, as a powerful witch with muti and the hyena was not only my familiar but now she was materialized inside the camp.  

It was only then that I realized that the hyena features prominently in the folklore and mythologies of many African people. While I had had a visceral and profound encounter the hyenas, I had unwittingly conferred the status of witch-wizard on myself.  

I was a witch.  I was the umthagathi wa isimpisi, the hyena witch.  I was the hyena and like her, I was a shapeshifter who rode her in the dead of the night, feeding on the souls of humans.  I rode my hyena naked at night, one foot on her back, my other foot dragging in the sand.  This powerful magic enables the hyena to reach high speeds and cross vast tracts of land.  There was no more powerful muti than this.  

Amandla isimpisi - Power to the hyenas.

© Erica Böhr, 2011