Hacking Identity – Dancing Diversity
Media scholar and curator Anett Holzheid writes on Marie-Luce Nadal’s work around her inclusion in the group exhibition Hacking Identity – Dancing Diversity at The ZKM, Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.
In Marie-Luce Nadal’s video installation The Share of Others, the oral cavity becomes an opera stage – the quintessential multimedia venue. As an interface between interior and exterior, incorporation and expulsion, it is a place where diverse forms of intermingling occur. Speaking lips appear as a projection inside the depiction of a wide-open mouth. In poetic images, Nadal describes the microcosm in which tragedies, exchange processes and transformations take place. This orifice is the zone where “self” cannot be distinguished from “world.” For Nadal, the flowing, invisible breath is the “commander” who is in charge of “blending with others.” To render this sensual quality tangible, she has created an installation in which pairs of viewers place their heads inside an acoustic cloud. In this intimate space, their twofold breathing composes an “invisible poem,” as Rainer Maria Rilke described it. In the second half of the video, what was previously discussed is dramatically conveyed in a performance determined by theatrical fog, light and music. Parallel to this installation, Nadal is presenting her small-scale sculpture The Opera Palatine, which she regards as “the full-size representation of the dramatic opera that is played every moment in my mouth.”
See more on the ZKM site.
