Solo exhibition at ADA, Rome, Italy, 2021
 

For her solo exhibition at ADA, Anna Perach presents an installation formed of three sculptural elements. Conceptually this exhibition explores the narrative of the detachment of the head and body in the female form. The sculptures more specifically investigate the brutality of the compartmentalisation of feminine body throughout narratives in mythology and folktale.

 

Seven Wives, 2020, consists of seven tufted heads hanging on a hemp rope by S-shaped hooks often used for hanging meat. Each head represents the one of the seven female archetypes proposed by psychoanalyst Carl Jung: maiden, huntress, lover, queen, mystic, sage and mother. The idea of hanging the heads draws its inspiration from an illustration for the folktale of Bluebeard depicting Bluebeard’s hanging dead wives, symbol of the violent and irrational behaviour afflicted to the female body throughout history.

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Daphne, 2021, and Transformer, 2021, are two tufted sculptures inspired by Griselda Pollock’s reading of Apollo and Daphne (1622-25) by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in her seminal book After- Affects/After-Image (2013). In her writing, Pollock describes her experience when looking at Daphne’s gasping, open mouth as if feeling Daphne’s soundless and desperate agony for Apollo’s undesired touch and her subsequent transformation into a tree. Perach recreates in her version the position of Daphne in Bernini’s piece but removes the negative figure of Apollo. Daphne is a dynamic, transitioning body but also an amputated one, lacking a head for expression and arms for touch and protection. Transformer complements Daphne, the same body is here examined only as a torso penetrated by the branches that come from within it.

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Text courtesy of ADA gallery

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