Six Nights in Ignaz Günther Haus

Where are the erotics, the romanticization, the illicit sexuality that runs just between racism and appreciation? Attraction and repulsion, in  the nether worlds of fascination. In what sites do we see something underneath, running underneath, half-illicit and unacknowledged…often in geopolitical sites of conflict, where the ideal body has waged total war against the “problematic” body. The charge remains. In Germany, it is this fascination with the Jewish female body. What is it. What does it look like when it is uncontained and unrestrained? Or, how would it feel to admit to a desire to recontain it, to restrain it, according to the instruction manuals for how to humiliate and degrade Jewish womankind? Or, who can be the one to liberate it. Celebrate it. Embrace it. Treasure it. This free girl, this free woman body: does it exist? and what does it offer, or prevent. Allow or deny. Accuse or excuse, forgive, take in. Where are its familiar pains. Its very unfamiliar pleasures.

There are a few of you left, said someone to me recently. But only a few. Mostly in New York. 

What is it like, to live in a dinosaur body? The body of a type of person who has been largely destroyed. But a few remain, as though in a zoo. It’s nobody’s fault. The snow leopard, the extinct animal – it was some greedy men with guns, old hunters, who did it. And now we file our children past their cage at the zoo, and everybody stares and points, and wants to touch.

The first projects I wanted to make here in Germany, three years ago, dealt with this catastrophic collision between a 2010 Jewish female body coming into contact with 1940s Jewish female bodies. To look back not at the unreachable icons of movie posters or beauty pageant photographs but quite the contrary: stacks of dead sticks of women. Carts of pale naked skeleton women. This time, I’ve begun making what has become known in my mind as the other side, the antidote: the presence of our bodies, alive. Is it an antidote, or a mirror?

This process of questioning brought into reflection the ways in which I’m read here – wandering through Germany in a mess of unruly black hair and relationships with Jewish institutions often yields wide eyed looks of curiosity and concern, and sometimes, very often, comments about the women of Klimt, and of Egon Schiele. We like these women. They are ugly but beautiful. They are awkward and angular, but erotic. They are doomed, and yet victorious. Or…they are victorious, yet doomed. Whichever seems more romantic. More museum-worthy. Resplendent, incautious  pussies, rampant on a field of imminent desire. They – or do I mean, we? – are a collision of conflicts and conundrums. Whether you like to look at them, or you look like them.

And I’ve returned to them, in lieu of other icons of erotic Jewish women. Where are we? Oh, there we are, gazing out from the masses of dark flowers, and luminous gold, and we the candlelight night women have an utterly different purpose and physiognomy from the visible-on-every-streetcorner ideal of maternal sun-and-blonde, white lace and blue eyes and an eager apron, a glass of beer with white froth in female form.

And so with this project I went into the gardens of former Nazi estates in Bavaria, with the night flowers, and the night women, and the dark creatures that speak of something different in a society dominated by the blue and the blonde…