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HD, Single-Channel Video, Colour, Sound
The Athena myth mutates in a video generated by a custom-built AI model, trained on videos of Simnett playing the flute. A glitching female figure, trapped inside technicolor blue woods, continually morphs, her face occasionally coalescing to resemble Simnett’s own. If a monster’s body is necessarily a social body (1), its form determined by accumulations of cultural anxiety, obsession, and desire, then Simnett’s OGRESS celebrates “the promises of monsters.” (2)
(1) See Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory: Reading Culture (1996).
(2) See Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others” (1992).
The multi-disciplinary artist Marianna Simnett works with film, installation, drawing, and sculpture. Her works center around the overlapping and at times incongruous themes of vulnerability, autonomy, control, pain, metamorphosis, and care. She uses narrative structures gleaned from fairytales, fables, and personal experience to creative immersive, visceral scenarios that engage notions of physical distress and release, focusing on the social, historical, and economic systems deployed to control human and animal bodies. Marianna Simnett (b. 1986) lives and works in Berlin. Her work has been exhibited internationally in solo exhibitions at venues including Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem; Kunsthalle Zürich; MMK, Frankfurt; and the New Museum, New York. Selected recent group exhibitions include the The Milk of Dreams,Venice Biennal (2022); Espressioni: The Epilogue, Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2022); British Art Show 9, various cities (2021); A Fire in my Belly, Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (2021).