Representations of women as leaky vessels – leaking vocally, emotionally, and sexually; wet,
unstable, and unable to contain themselves – recur throughout (Western) cultural history. These
motifs lie in direct contrast to the dry stability and verbal continence of “man”. But even a dried
clay vessel, once filled with water, will eventually break and become soft, malleable dirt again – a
lesson in the dissolution of rigid forms.

The exhibition deals with gender-specific speech shame and the accompanying feeling of powerlessness. It shows continuities in the reception and pathologization of female tongues from Greek mythology to the present day and finds suggestions for self-empowerment in the Neolithic.

Lining the walls of the space, Elke Auer’s large-scale site-specific tableau consists of several
elements. Collages, drawings, posters, objects, and photographs from the artist’s atlas of images are
combined with pictures borrowed and recycled from (art) history, forming a sort of hyper-image.
Here, different characters and stories, attributions and paraphrases meet and merge. Elke Auer condenses
this wide range of projections onto bodies gendered female into works that deal with gender
attribution, anger, powerlessness, self-empowerment, and language.

This exhibition is part of the CRK+ Network

CRKF is a network of four independent institutions in Graz, whose common interest is the mediation of contemporary art in an international context.