100 Years of Violation
2015
For the exhibition Truce. One Hundred Years of Ideas (Våbenhvile. 100 Års Forestillinger) at Overgaden – the Institute for Contemporary Art in 2015, which was one of several exhibitions celebrating 100 years of women’s suffrage, I worked on a collective trauma – sexual violence. The work, 100 Years of Violation (100 Års Overgreb), consists of a stage curtain made of semi-transparent silk with automatic writing and texts from an extensive Danish report on rape. The report systematically explains the character of the sexualised violence, the crime scene, the relation to the perpetrator and the ways in which the perpetrator tried to avoid being reported to the police. One of the categories was: killed the victim.
While working on the automatic writing, I meditated on the violations women have been subjected to over the last 100 years, which then became a series of signs and words; you could say voices from a chorus of violence. In both types of text, the act of repetition has a decisive function. Automatic writing is a method of accessing the unconscious, while the textual excerpts from the rape report constitute the rational. When you ‘repeat’ the action of two opposite types of text, you expand and put a perspective on the trauma’s dehumanising effect on the individual, both societally and culturally.
100 Years of Violation, silk, wood, text, automatic writing 300 x 600 x 5 cm. 2015