Loretta Fahrenholz

Matthias Michalka (Herausgeber)

For her exhibition in mumok, Small Habit Revolution, artist and filmmaker Loretta Fahrenholz has created two new pieces that address key feminist works of the 1940s and their transfer into various Internet formats. The publication mirrors both works: Story in Reverse is a multi-part slide installation based on Ilse Aichinger’s Mirror Story (1949), a linguistic experiment that narrates a young woman’s tragically failed life. In Aichinger’s text the beginning and the end of life merge. Aichinger’s reversal of a life story structurally denies both chronology and causality.
The second work also involves the death of a young woman. This is Maya Deren’s avant-garde film classic Meshes of the Afternoon, a short film that Deren made together Alexander Hammid, her husband at the time, in 1943. Meshes of the Afternoon shows a woman’s nightmare in gloomy hallucinatory images. She is seen pursuing a figure cloaked in black, going about daily business and routines, and then at the end of the afternoon she commits suicide. This story draws on Deren’s personal memories and dreams and was made in her own house. It offers no easy interpretation.