Sandra Lahire, Celeste Burlina: we sat rigid except for the parts of our bodies that were needed for production, Grazer Kunstverein

A sentence taken from the film Terminals (1986) by the feminist experimental filmmaker Sandra Lahire (1950–2001) lends the exhibition its title. This early work led the artist to her trilogy on nuclear power, investigating what is at stake in this capitalist production affecting the human body and nature. The term rigidity in we sat rigid except for the parts of our bodies that were needed for production is translated into tangible form in the installation at the entrance area of the restructured Grazer Kunstment, and the trilogy echoes the concerns of the anti-nuclear movement, which are disturbingly relevant today. Her films brought together documentary approaches, performances, a plethora of images (one superimposed on the next), animations, and experimentations with color, acid, speed, and light. Uranium Hex (1987) explores the dangers of uranium extraction in Canada, lending voice to the workers exposed to nuclear radiation. A haunting soundscape accompanies images of mining workers, heavy machines, flowing water, and seemingly untouched but highly contaminated nature. Likewise produced one year after the Chernobyl disaster, Plutonium Blonde (1987) follows a woman operating on plutonium monitors at the core of an atomic reactor in Britain (at the time there were forty- two), bringing together issues of atomic advertisement and secretly filmed materials. Lahire’s most comprehensive work, which brings the trilogy to a conclusion, is installed in the following space. Serpent River (1989) is set in Ontario at an Anishinaabe reserve, addressing the uranium extraction, which due to a missing water purification system more strongly affected the Indigenous communities, resulting in miscarriages, Down syndrome, and neurological disorders. Particularly images of women and children from the Serpent River community being in the snow or water address the body’s vulnerability: the environment intersects with the social and political landscape.

Celeste Burlina responded to this complex theme, especially to the vulnerable (female) body and the male-dominated mining industry, its materials or heavy machinery. She drilled through the architecture of the Kunstverein: in some instances, the holes in the exhibition walls remained visible, drill heads piercing them; in one case, a heavy steel chain runs through the wall; in another, the wall has been partially broken out, revealing the hidden steel structure. In thinking with and through the artistic practice of Lahire, Burlina takes up the loose ends of the dialogue: “With this intervention of perforating and acting on the building, you create a place that is vulnerable” (p. 20). “I use them to cut through the parameters of a woman’s role in society. To give her freedom through destructive actions” (p. 19). In Lahire’s work, these actions keep returning. verein venue: the foyer became a white cube with a long H-beam on the floor pointing to the adjacent galleries. This powerful gesture, seemingly cutting through the architecture, is part of the intervention by Celeste Burlina (b. 1988) and brings all the gamut of male-dominated modernity in a white cube to mind—which will be deconstructed in the following. The artist, designer, and writer, who holds a PhD in engineering, concentrates on spatial interventions and explores architecture as an interface between infrastructure and people, questioning how we gather and assemble. The Kunstverein’s new director, Tom Engels, brought these two artistic positions together and worked closely with Burlina in order to rethink the understanding of architecture. The foyer serves as a venue for screenings, performances, and various forms of debates around issues raised in the work of Lahire; the queer activist was a central member of the feminist and experimental filmmaking community in London. Engels is curating the largest exhibition of Sandra Lahire to date, bringing together six of her experimental films; five are newly digitalized, but her work is not relegated to the 1980s and shown in an archaeological or historicizing manner. Instead, it stands within contemporary contexts and is immersed in dialogue.

Guided by the beams in the following spaces, Lahire’s projections seem to hover above the robust steel structures constructed by Burlina (on which the transparent surfaces hung from the ceiling are fixed). In the 1980s, when Lahire’s films were made, uranium was vital for generating electricity, medicine, and nuclear arms we sat rigid except for the parts of our bodies that were needed for production. The further the visitors move into the space of the Kunstverein, the further they also move toward the body of Lahire: her first 16mm film centers around her ongoing struggle with anorexia (which eventually led to her death). Arrows (1984) is a negotiation between the female body and its political condition through images of caged birds, body parts, grids, and lines. She shares a recording of a male voice on the method of liposuction, her desperate phone call at a therapy center, and includes the voice of Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) reading from her poem “The Thin People.” The work of the American poet and writer, who was depressed and committed suicide at the age of thirty, was central to Lahire’s film Edge (1986), bearing the title of one of Plath’s last poems: images of bruised human faces, medical instruments, bandages, blood, or white foam lay bare the vulnerability of female beings. This thinking through and with Lahire further manifests in the editorial strategies of the beautiful small publication (the first of a series developed together with Belgian graphic designer Julie Peeters) which accompanies the show and features the debates and voices that Tom Engels brought together to surround the project. It acts as an intimate addition to the exhibition and enhances the intergenerational dialogue around the ecological and sociopolitical implications of being a woman at work.