Zurich's Hoftlichersalle opened its fall season with an international exhibition of post-feminist art. Vancouver's Katja Pumes evoked the sublime and the real with her back-lit hyper-realistic cibachromes of staged events important to post-feminist theory. Her invocation of old tropes combined with her natural pedagogy resulted in the most critically introspective component of this exhibition.
Wild cougars perched on impressive rock formations were placed in stark contrast to the dialectic materialism of the natural setting. These nature photographs had been reworked in a cause and effect process that only served to confuse and confront. The meat dangling from these cougars' mouths was months old! On closer inspection even the most daring of make-up artists had not been able to hide the faces of the actresses posing as these giant life-like cats. Interspersed through the panels of photography were panels of custom-made velvet drapes, pinch pleated with vertical blinds behind them, hiding the true nature of the evocation to reality. These vertical blinds brought to mind the cost of human suffering about upward mobility and a defiance of the Marxist horizontal lines regarding the state of capital as we know it. The demarcation of statement so artistically smoothed by the softness of the velvet was all the more upsetting in its intensity.
Flesh Art Correspondent, Zurich
