Festival of Art in Public Spaces

Andree Weschler

Andree Weschler (born 1963 Alsace /France, lives and works in Singapore)

Andree Weschler, is a French artist who has been living and practising art in Asia for more than 13 years. She studied Visual Arts in Singapore, Australia and Les Beaux Arts de Paris. From 2000 she has regularly exhibited in Asia, Europe and South America. She works in the field of various media - she is an artist of performance, she sombines drawing, installation, video, photography and sound.

She is interested in using her body to understand and express her ideas. The body is her tool to discover material and become a material in itself. Her work explores the boundaries of acceptable social constructs. Andree Weschler performs in public spaces in order to challenge the general populace to read her performance of bodily difference. Weschler reveals how social principles cramp primary instincts, regulate behaviour in public space. She shows the part of the society which has been excluded and closed into a private sphere, seperate and joint at the same time. It has become a kind of secret that everybody carries.

Weschler is balancing on the border of what is claimed to be normal and what departures from the norm. In "The Little Red Riding Hood" she painted her lips red and she did the same with her whole face, shoulders and hands. In "Domesticated in her Animality" she was plucking her eyebrows and at the end she pulled them completely out. The initial act of constructing beauty has crossed the limit of its presentation. At "The Parasite" (2005) Weschler appeared with a shaved head in a white dress. She painted her tongue and the inner side of her mouth in black and then she pulled a desperately wry face. She created a moving view of the rotten inside of the human body, as if there would be a inexplicable and unavoidable process of decay under the sterile shell of the body and clothes.

She has completed two large projects in public space. The first one took place in Tokio in year 2000. The title was "Between the Hair and the Stone" and it was a screening of a film showed from a gallery onto one of the buildings on Ginza Street (famous for the most ekslusive shops in Tokio). In this film Weschler presents a reflection on socially imposed aspects of beauty such as shaving hair of armpits. She exposes the usually hidden activities, she builds a strong contrast between what is socially acceptable and what is primary and retouched by popculture. The artist claims that the attempt to erase our animal features such as hair growing is doom to failure because they never stop growing.

The next project in city space - "Hairy Virgin" - refers to the sixteenth century illustrations of Pierre Boitsuau, which present a woman covered completely with hair. Weschler was walking down the streets of a city dressed in a flesh-coloured suit covered with hair. This project was first shown in Seul in 2003, afterwards in Singapore and in Tokio a year ago. She also plans to do this project in Paris where the original drawing comes from.

"The choir" - the work that will be presented in Lublin as a poster action was shown before as a performance, installation and in digital prints. The theme of an open mouth full of strings refer to Church songs from Sunday mass. The static, silent picture of a tangle of small wires which imitate the vocal cords coming out of the throat, is a far reminiscene of singing angels and saints from Christian icons. Clement of Alexandria compared the universe to instruments with multiple scales, singing to Logos and the human body to a musical instrument. The image created by Weschler doesn't contain singing but its simulation. Soundless singing according to the Pythagorian point of view is close to achieving harmony in space: "One who examines the harmony of the world, order and accordance with all creation, rises holy singing."

phot. Chua Ka-Inn, Hairy Virgin project