BOOK LAUNCH: Nanna Lysholt Hansen – Dura Mater, RSS Press, Fotografisk Center, january 2025
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
In her performance art, Nanna Lysholt Hansen works with appropriated text as an investigation of how the voice can act as a both constitutive and destabilizing element in the experience of the body, as well as how the body itself is a technological and biological intergenerational mediator for knowledge, memory and voice.
The series Dura Mater (2016-2018) is an art project that was created in the process of mothering, in collaboration with Lysholt Hansen’s then toddler daughter on the latter’s initiative. It consists of her daughter’s appropriation of the documentation (an archive of photographs, video stills, contact sheets, and digital prints) of Lysholt Hansen’s performances for camera from 2004 to 2018, including reworking them with ink, watercolours, glitter glue, paint, glowing slime, and nail polish. Her daughter’s markings and overpainting of the material from the archive are both loving and caressing, but sometimes also consist of complete erasures of the mother-body in the images. The applied signs create a layer which is both tactile and textual, and articulates the processes of memory through superimposition and sedimentation, as well as memory’s relation to matter. In Dura Mater, the body’s serial movements are uncovered and examined together with the daughter’s interruption and renewal of repetition through her marking of the images. The status of the works is altered, so that the images cease to be only documentation and become photographic objects, symbols of visual and tactile transmission and knowledge sharing between generations.
ABOUT THE BOOK DURA MATER
Title: Nanna Lysholt Hansen – Dura Mater
Publisher: Really Simple Syndication Press, Copenhagen, https://www.rssprss.net/
Texts: Kirsten Thorup, Nanna Lysholt Hansen, Tina Kinsella, Irina Aristarkhova, Peggy Phelen and Mel Day
Editors: Christopher Sand-Iversen, Lise Margrethe Jørgensen, Nanna Lysholt Hansen
Publication date: 2025 TBA: book launch event with readings and performance at Fotografisk Center, Copenhagen https://www.fotografiskcenter.dk/
Content of the book
The book Dura Mater will contain images of the 484 appropriated photographic objects from the series, as well as contributions from a selection of invited writers. The images are thus complemented with various theoretical, artistic, and literary voices:
- Nanna Lysholt Hansen will contribute with a new performance text that evolved around an ongoing conversation between her and the Danish author Kirsten Thorup (b. 1942), about art, literature, and mothering. The text also references Lysholt Hansen’s own earlier performance text the camera body, Thorup’s poetic debut, Danish author Inger Christensen’s (1935-2009) writings and Luce Irigaray’s thinking about human relationships, in a continuation of Lysholt Hansen’s method of textual appropriation. In this way, a layer of reworking is applied to the conversation, which mirrors her daughter’s reworking of the images as well as the reciprocity of the conversation as a form, relations between transcript, script and performance text.
- Peggy Phelan, Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University’s English Faculty, is invited to contribute with a text, in a format of her own choice, on the relationship between words, language, and the body, which she has previously written about in texts such as To Suffer a Sea Change (1991). She is invited to contribute a performative text that brings back to critical theory a certain affective emotional force in response to art work, or to write forth an inception to the Dura Mater project in a similar style to her J.D. project, titled and signed with the initial P.S.
- Irina Aristarkhova, Professor of Art and Design, and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan is invited to contribute with a text, in a format of her own choice, about themes such as hospitality in relation to the maternal, relations between women and technology, intergenerational knowledge production and sharing, and could refer to or make use of her existing texts, such as Hospitality and the Maternal (2012) or Being (with) Artists (2011).
- Tina Kinsella, Head of Department of Design and Visual Arts, Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dublin, and Research Fellow at the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, Trinity College Dublin, is invited to contribute with a text, in a format of her own choice, about themes such as of memory, photography, and the mother in philosophy and psychoanalysis, previously written about in texts such as Sticky Notes. Response to Frozen Time Liquid Memories, a film by Dragan Kujundzic (2013) or make use of an existing text such as Towards Thinking a Desideratum of Art (2012).
- Kirsten Thorup will contribute with three poems from her debut Indeni-udenfor (1967), translated for the first time to English Inside-outside (Christopher Sand-Iversen, 2024)
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By referring directly to or indirectly making use of their existing texts, the invited writers` contributions will fit into the same conceptual framework as Dura Mater, taking the ‘old’ out of the archive and giving it a new life through reinterpretation and reworking.
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Bogen Dura Mater af Nanna Lysholt Hansen er en tværæstetisk undersøgelse af bogformen i sammenstilling af billeder og tekst.
Nanna Lysholt Hansen har i de seneste år arbejdet med approprieret tekst i sin performance-kunst, hvor hun undersøger hvordan stemmen kan virke både konstituerende og destabiliserende i oplevelsen af kroppen. I hendes performance serie Dear Daughter sammenskriver hun egne erfaringer omkring kvindekroppen – graviditet, fødsel, moderskab og seksualitet – med tekstfragmenter fra litterære formødre og skaber hybridtekster, som performes i samspil med playback teknologi.
Sideløbende med disse Dear Daughter performances har Nanna Lysholt Hansen i samarbejde med sin daværende 3-årige datter skabt serien Dura Mater bestående af 463 fotografier og video-sekvenser af hendes praksis i ‘performance for kamera’ fra perioden 2004-2020, som datteren har approprieret i 2016-2020. Barnets markeringer er skiftevist kærlige og kærtegnende, eller udviskelser af moderens krop i billedet.
Dura Mater serien handler om krop og billede som centrum for overlevering af viden gennem generationer.
Dura Mater bogen tænkes som et litterært initiativ hvor billedsekvenser skaber narrativer og de påførte tegn skaber et tekstuelt lag.
I Dura Mater afdækkes og undersøges kroppens serielle bevægelser sammen med datterens markeringer af fotografierne. Barnets bidrag genfortolker og viderefører morens undersøgelser ved at ændre værkernes status, så de ophører med ’bare’ at være fotografier. De bliver til fotografiske objekter bliver symbol på overlevering og vidensdeling mellem generationer.
Samarbejdet med barnet udvikler sig til et omvendt eller anakronistisk slægtsbånd hvor barnet føder moderen, kunsten undfanger morkunstneren. Morkunstneren genfortolker og genbruger både andres og eget materiale og skaber – i et væv af inter-generationel, flerartet og flerstemmig sammenhørighed – en bæredygtig kunstpraksis.
I arbejdet med bogen Dura Mater vil der være en redigeringsproces i sammenstillingen af billeder til pågældende narrativer i samspil med en nyskrevet tekst Kamerakroppen af Nanna Lysholt Hansen.
I teksten genbesøger kunstneren igennem fotografierne de rum hun har levet og arbejdet i, i samarbejde med kameraet, og den tid hun har arbejdet med datteren. I teksten sker en slags sammensmeltning af barnet og kameraet, hvorved der skabes en form for flertunget, flersproget, flerartet cyborg-samvær.
Dertil vil der være flere bidrag med videnskabelige og litterære stemmer, som analyserer og diskuterer projektet. Gennem Nanna Lysholt Hansens nye samarbejde med forlaget Really Simple Syndication, er der i den redaktionelle proces kommet øget fokus på den kunstneriske og litterære research, som forlaget lægger vægt på, og som både forlag og kunstner mener vil udfolde dette projekts potentiale til det fulde.
I den sammenhæng vil bogen omfatte yderligere:
– Tekstbidrag af Peggy Phelan, Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University’s English Faculty
– Tekstbidrag af Irina Aristarkhova, Professor of Art and Design, and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan
– Tekstbidrag af Tina Kinsella, Head of Department of Design and Visual Arts, Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dublin, and Research Fellow at the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, Trinity College Dublin,
– En samtale mellem Nanna Lysholt Hansen og forfatteren Kirsten Thorup, om kunst, litteratur og moderskab. Kirsten Thorup har været involveret i projektet ved at gennemlæse den ovennævnte nyskreven tekst, og kender Nanna Lysholt Hansens praksis indgående.
– Tre digte fra Kirsten Thorups debut Indeni-udenfor (1967) i engelsk oversættelse (Christopher Sand-Iversen, 2024)
Dura Mater bogen er et led i Nanna Lysholt Hansens arbejde med at udvikle en ‘matrixiel æstetik’, hvori hun bruger ‘cyborgmoderen’ som figur til at tænke igennem. Målet er at gentænke slægtskaber, subjektivitet og vidensproduktion igennem hybride former for tekst, performance, video og lydinstallationer. Hun har for nyligt opført sine tekstbaserede live performances på steder som Kvindemuseet, SMK-Statens Museum for Kunst, Kunsthal Charlottenborg og I:project Beijing (2018). Hun har udgivet teksterne til sine Dear Daughter performances på forlaget Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology (DK, 2017/2020) samt bogen Dear Mary (Memories of the Future) Logbook på Forlaget Fotografisk Center (DK, 2015).
Moderskabet bliver i disse år taget op til debat i kunsten, litteraturen og i samfundsdebatten — både internationalt og i dansk kontekst. Dura Mater vil med sit tværæstetiske format være et eksperimenterende og udfordrende bidrag til bølgen af moderstemmer i kunsten og litteraturen disse år.