Two suspects

Graphic series and duo show with Marie Rosenzweig, Borch’s Editions 2024.

Two suspects

An exhibition by Marie Rosenzweig & Anna Stahn - Written by Anna Stahn

One of the first times I saw Marie Rosenzweig’s work was up in the sky in a gallery in Copenhagen, she was exhibiting a painting titled Slasher and I remember very clearly the feeling of it; a pair of legs wearing pink stockings, something hiding in a matter of dark, a collage, a shooting, a movement or flash of some kind - if one was occupied with the dreamyness of the gallery placed in an old penthouse apartment, one would perhaps notice the stockings, the indisputable skill of painting, painting like collage, and the colors; dry as old badly printed napkins and so dusty, yet fresh. But the title’s what's really got to me, Slasher, it tightened the bow on me becoming a fan of Marie Rosenzweig's work. I was like; what aggression topping those dusty colors, how gurlesque of her!

I've seen the tension ever since in her works; paintings of red toolboxes, red Gucci bags, skeleton and Eve suits, a feeling of sci-fi film, of americana, the uncanny hiding in the cool.

I usually say that there are two ways of reading my works; reading the heading or reading the subtext. In the Heading the works can be read as purely aesthetic, cute, comical even; a restless nude in pajamas, a bronze pig with a $ biting an apple. The subtext is more critical; references to female tropes and slurs, class and consumerism, sigh of loneliness and obsession. There's no right reading but the desire I am driven by to make the works mostly stem from the subtext. From ambiguous even angry feelings. There's a goth girl’s braids, baskets of red poisoned apples meant for bankers and perverts.

Planning this duoshow - my immediate thought was to use the opportunity of the collaboration to let that goth girl out, since beside being one of my favorite painters, Marie Rosenzweig better than anyone balances the tension of sweetness and aggression, of horror and makeup table if you will, so well. Let's do Halloween, a crime, a horror show...

Why horror? Isn't that just gaudy.. Don’t we have enough darkness from watching the news? From tacky true crime. Horror is an industry, a product, like porn; films, books, experience economy, theme parks, podcasts, with the purpose of shocking (and exciting). Why desire this unpleasant product? We could just watch society; the punishments for being femme, for being a specific person all day long; murder, rape, revenge. Gisele Pelicot on TV in her sunglasses, a haunted train station in Denmark where I hold my breath in fright as I drive by. Fright triggers adrenaline and therefore sensations of energy. Female consumers of crime shows might seek horror to gain experiences and prepare for the horrors of real life. At least horror may help to satisfy curiosity about the absurd in human psychology while we snuggle up safely and have a little snack.

I talked to a friend, she is a psychologist, about the men who assaulted Gisele Pelicot, one of them her neighbor. What kind of conversation between her husband and the neighbor leads to an invitation of rape? A casual one? A casual misogynistic one? My friend thinks the casualty is internalized misogyny, and that the actions stem from perversions and that all perversions stem from trauma. She thinks acting on violent perversions is avoiding being a victim of the same violence. That women visiting serial killers in prison, is a result of self punishment for being a woman, putting oneself in a dangerous position, but also a way of gaining control, maybe ending up the exception; the one who doesn't get killed.

Since I was maybe 6 years old, I've sensed the stale feeling of danger from men, a specific kind of violence - my mom and I lived in this wonderful social housing complex built like a village by idealistic architects in the 70's; Four huge playgrounds, always someone to play with. You just went down and played. All kids knew the rules; be home by dinner, don’t cross the parking lot, call for a parent if someone falls and stay away from the catman.

The catman was in his 50es and lived alone he was called the catman because there had once been kittens at one of the playgrounds and he had been there watching them with us, the kittens were long gone, but the catman was still there watching, he knew our names, ages, our birthdays and addresses, he asked our moms about where we were when we visited our dads in the weekends until he knew our schedule, he offered us money and candy. We knew not to go with him when he invited us, he always did, once the bravest and baddest girl, my friend - went with him on a dare and the catman’s couch had been filled with naked dolls, on the dining table bowls full of candy - he had asked her to play with the dolls but she had ran out to escape the catman and receive her award, a legend from that day on.

Later I felt this specific violence when watching horror films at movie nights with my friends, clutching our pillows, stuffing our faces with candy, playing truth or dare, wishing to be the popular girls while watching popular girls get murdered on screen, the most demure surviving, the brattiest dying first. I recognized it when men on the street yelled things, when boys, though I was very young, liked my voice a pitch lighter, sounding a little like a child’s.

Later I found Sukeban mangas where schoolgirls are taking revenge on adult men, May where a gothic hottie sews a boyfriend out of body parts after being bullied, books like Let the right one in by John Ajvide Lindqvist, where the monster is an androgynous child vampire who doesn't like to kill but the real monster is a human pedophile doing the killing for something in return. Fernanda Melchor’s book Paradais about incels. Her body and other parties by Carmen Maria Machado - on being a wife, a consumer, on a diet, invisible and in danger. Things we lost in the fire by Mariana Enriquez - religious and political horror. Geek Love by Katherine Dunn - grotesque greedy body horror. Frankenstein by Mary Shelly. All the queer coded horror; The Rocky Horror Picture show, The iconic Leigh bowery's masks, Mike Kelley's exhibition The Uncanny. The Danish poet Cecilie Lind’s goth poetry on luring men into tramps on a hot blurr of starvation and folklore-like mascara. Artworks flipped 180 degrees - by the ones who are usually in the role of victims and queer-villans, using the cliche-filled genre as a canvas for exploiting desires, fears, experience, terrifying norms.

So what I think is, when work has a touch of femininity; a pair of pink stockings, skirts, nail polish fingers reaching out, when it has a certain tone - it might inexplicably also contain a little horror, a little violence or anger. Something repressed or objectified luring inside of the girly, fleeing through a flower field. There is no housewife or little girl's fruit basket without a swirl of suspicion, someone luring, twisting innocence around. Nor any girl walking home at night without maybe holding a knife or a set of keys, for protection or attack, nor a pair of sexy legs without the potential of them being in a scene of a slasher - since there is always so much horror hidden in the original crime of being a girl.