Kein Bock, du Sünder!

in: Installation » 2021

Petra Mar­tin­etz Gal­ler­ie
08.07.2021 - 21.08.2021

Images by Tamara Lorenz

Evamaria Schaller, born in Graz, Aus­tria, in 1980, lives in Co­logne. She works in the fields of per­form­ance, video, in­stall­a­tion and pho­to­graphy. Her ex­hib­i­tion Kein Bock, Du Sünder! deals with ques­tions con­cern­ing the at­tri­bu­tion of guilt, moral con­cepts, scope for pos­sib­il­ity and justice with­in the frame­work of vari­ous series of works.

Lisa Kloster­köt­ter: The scape­goat is a proxy, a screen that is used as a means of tak­ing re­spons­ib­il­ity for the mis­takes of oth­ers, a bur­den is placed on him/her, and he/she is held re­spons­ible for the ac­tions of oth­ers.

Evamaria Schaller: The idea that a scape­goat is re­quired when a com­munity is torn apart or when it feels threatened by a cata­strophe has been handed down from an­cient Meso­pot­amia.

LK: This brings to mind Silvia Fe­d­er­i­ci’s book ‘C­aliban and the Witch’ (2012) and her clas­si­fic­a­tion of the sys­tem­at­ic tor­ture and murder of hun­dreds of thou­sands of women in the 16th and 17th cen­tur­ies. She sees the or­gan­ised ex­term­in­a­tion of women as an at­tack on their res­ist­ance to the spread of cap­it­al­ist re­la­tions, and an at­tack on the power that women had ac­quired through their sexu­al­ity, their con­trol over re­pro­duc­tion and their heal­ing abil­it­ies.

EMS: The woman as sin­ner and scape­goat – the om­ni­present search for the guilty party or parties formed im­port­ant points of de­par­ture for this ex­hib­i­tion, as they also have a strong im­pact on me as an artist.

LK: Frag­ments of your body can be seen in most of the ex­hib­ited works. Are they self-por­tray­als or do you use your body more as a place­hold­er in order to pro­ject bey­ond it and to draw at­ten­tion to spe­cif­ic is­sues?

EMS: Ex­actly, I use my body as a proxy in all of my work, most of the time my face is not even vis­ible. In the ex­hib­ited photo series, I am deal­ing, among other things, with ma­ter­i­al­ity, with the body and the car­nal, the car­nal lust of sin.

LK: Some of your works also por­tray ver­it­able scape­goat at­trib­utes: an­im­al antlers with male con­nota­tions, phal­lic rep­res­ent­a­tions, in­flat­able plastic dildos that are at­tached to your body like pros­theses or mod­ules and then staged to­geth­er in front of the cam­era. I find it in­ter­est­ing how the fe­male (artist’s) body com­bines with sup­posedly male char­ac­ter­ist­ics to be­come the scape­goat fig­ure. Con­versely, the title is ini­tially ad­dressed to a man: you sin­ner!

EMS: I am really in­ter­ested in trans­form­at­ive mo­ments, how do I be­come an an­im­al, or a man? How would I get rid of a penis or how would I get one in order to stand equally? Do I need to ‘ac­quire’ other at­trib­utes to be per­ceived dif­fer­ently? What are the trans­form­a­tion pro­cesses that we ourselves con­stantly enter into be­cause it is de­man­ded of us, or be­cause we have the free­dom to choose them for ourselves? For me, trans­form­a­tion is also re­lated to ques­tions of who is car­ry­ing some­thing, bear­ing it and what is being passed on.

LK: With re­spect to the pho­to­graphs, ques­tions about trans­formed and shared guilt also sur­face in my mind. Does the body de­pic­ted in the im­ages as­sume a sin, does it bur­den it­self with guilt, or is guilt placed upon it? Both ele­ments come to­geth­er for me, the pic­tures pos­sess some­thing de­light­fully play­ful and at the same time also a ded­ic­ated weight. This makes me think of the “ori­gin­al sin”, the “un­holy state” that was brought about by the fall of Adam and Eve and has been “bur­den­ing man­kind” ever since.

EMS: Of course, for me, “sin” is gen­er­ally a term with very Chris­ti­an re­li­gious con­nota­tions. Hav­ing grown up Cath­ol­ic and gone to a Cath­ol­ic girls’ gram­mar school, sin was very much present in my youth. We used to com­pete in con­fes­sion, we often went to the priest re­spons­ible and snorted things out of our noses. Sin as some­thing cool. Then the scape­goat is not too far away.