Sadie Murdoch: Sss—Mm

Britain’s Sadie Murdoch (b. 1965), a lecturer at Goldsmith College in London, addresses gender issues and female protagonists in modern art. In so doing, she primarily pays attention to modes of representation, for instance in photographic archive material, which she decodes with her feminist gaze and reconstructs. For her color photographs, this artist adopts the role and position of a person captured in a historical photograph. In this process of restaging and re-enactment of black-and-white photographs in color, for which the artist dyes her skin in achromatic shades of gray, she does not merely reconstruct the situations, but adds minimal deviations and manipulations, such that reality and fiction, as well as painting and photography, blend together. On the basis of this engagement with photographic archive material, Sadie Murdoch studies how reception is constructed in the modern world.

For her exhibition at Museum Haus Konstruktiv, this artist has made collages by accessing photos of the “Rotoreliefs” (1926) developed by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, as well as of “Bar Aubette” (1927/1928), designed by Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Here, she combines fragments from photographs of her own body with fragmentary photographs of the historical figures Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Josephine Baker. The Australian feminist Germaine Greer is also present in these collages. Both photographic series revolve around topics pertaining to the staging of the self within the charged environment of the actual and the apparent, of reality and fiction, and of fact and myth. A dialog exists between Sadie Murdoch’s collages and the works in the historical group exhibition “DADA Differently”, which is presented simultaneously at Museum Haus Konstruktiv.