O.T.
/5
- Untitled
- O.T.
- 1999/2011/2019
- 4 parts; sandpapered and sewn together c-prints
This four-part work consists of photographs taken by Maria Hahnenkamp herself showing a model in stereotypical situations from the life of women, such as at the hairdresser or cosmetics studio. The next step in Hahnenkamp’s process was to work on these photos with sandpaper so heavily as to nearly obliterate the motif, meaning that only the photos’ outer edges still indicate their being photographs. These scraped-off individual photos were then sewn together by machine to produce a single, overall whole, each joining the others to form a seemingly abstract image. The monochrome white surface that results thus has an explicit history which Hahnenkamp works in reality to suppress. The “image of perfection” thus produced simultaneously demarcates the symptomatic, “female” blank that it constitutively covers up, referring both to the phenomenon of suppression and to the intrinsic violence upon which this process is based. Each of these images thus “mounted together” by sewing machine is then given its own white frame and hung end-to-end, lending the work a hieratic quality that Hahnenkamp, however, simultaneously calls into question via her methodical concept. S.E.