Erasure
Hosea, Birgitta (2018) Erasure. [Animation, Drawing, Exhibition/show, Installation, Performance]
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Scouring, scrubbing, sweeping, bleaching, rinsing, brushing away – all of these words refer to different ways of removing dirty marks during the act of cleaning. All of these processes were also used to make the works in Erasure, a body of work brought together as a solo show at Hanmi Gallery, Seoul. The exhibits included a short film that the exhibition is named after, installations of animation projected over wall mounted objects, defaced books, photographic documentation and remnants from a performance that took place at the private view.
The word ‘erasure’ has a number of possible interpretations that could refer to removing part of a drawing, cleaning away dirt, censorship or obliteration. Through animation, sequential works on paper and performance, processes of erasure are used to record the duration and actions of domestic labour. Inspired by Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, the works investigate how invisible labour can be made visible through a physical and material approach rooted in auto-ethnography. Based on the artist’s personal experience of working as a domestic cleaner and memories of her Grandmothers, these works use repetitive actions of scrubbing and scouring and the textures of ink, bleach and other cleaning products to reanimate household labour.
Although other female artists have engaged with acts of cleaning that are performed and then documented – e.g. Sophie Calle (1981); Mierle Laderman Ukeles (1973) or the removal of surfaces – e.g. Naomi Uman (1999), Adrian Piper (2003) or an animated cleaning lady – Zilla Leutenegger (2010), this series of works employs the techniques, tools and materials of cleaning in order to directly. record domestic and manual labour. This is intended to give a voice to the experience of working-class women, whose perspective is erased from society in general and rarely shown in the gallery context.
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