works – pictures
Room of Inanna
Kunsthaus Essen 2023
On the wall of the room it reads:
„INANNA, Queen of Heaven and Earth,
heard the call down into the depths.
At the end of her journey down
she hung as rotting flesh on a hook.
In total surrender she was helped
by small figures, the mourners.
…
You are invited to write down a word of „Surrender“.
The word „surrender“ can have a negative connotation, a flavor of helpless submission. Here, however, this ability rather means a letting go, which only makes a new beginning possible by pausing:. Coming to one’s senses and stepping out of a system in order to be able to develop new perspectives and impulses.
The work refers to the oldest Babylonian myth of „Inanna“, a goddess who was the model for the Egyptian Isis, the Greek Aphrodite and the Nordic Freya. Here, for the first time, a process of descent into an underworld is thematized as a self-encounter with subsequent resurrection. The myth confronts what is not seen in everyday life: secret desires and unfamiliar abysses, celebrated despair and avoidance strategies learned through social demands.
My „Room of Inanna“ is skinned with images of this process as a kind of map. On all sides of the room, guardians of this journey can be seen. Countless needles protrude from the body of the one, delicate and brutal at the same time. The wax figures of the mourners stand by the travelers, accompanying us, past a tomb-like metal bed of salt. The decisive thing is the impulse to action, to carve a word into the wax that makes letting go possible.
The journey of Inanna can lead to peace through the surrender of what usually keeps us from feeling that peace. The longing for this space arose in me in confrontation with current reports of war and other catastrophes and the resulting painful question: Can the art that we have seen in our lives in countless museums, art fairs, etc., in the event of war or other unbearable catastrophes, give us peace?
