Exhibition on view: TRUTZ SIMPLEX

Paint Shop
Hasenheide 12
10967 Berlin

paintshop.berlin@gmail.com
+49 176 996 244 47
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every Friday & Saturday 2 - 7pm
jeden Freitag & Samstag 14 - 19 Uhr
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With Trutz Simplex, sculptor and author Anna Herms presents her first solo exhibition at the Paint Shop Gallery. The starting point is Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (1405) by French writer Christine de Pizan, who designs a symbolic city of women – her building materials are not stones, but stories and myths of women from biblical, ancient and recent history. In doing so, Pizan partly puts on the mask of the naïve, repeating male arguments against women with feigned seriousness, only to refute them in the next scene from the role of the self-aware author. Herms takes this work as the basis for an artistic archaeology of female voices.

Ceramic sculptures and a video work become finds from a journey through time, a literary excavation in which the goddess Bastet appears alongside the spirits of countless female writers, from de Pizan to Karoline von Günderrode, Virginia Woolf, Irmtraud Morgner, Elfriede Jelinek and Virginie Despentes, making buried positions visible and tangible.
The interplay of these works intensifies themes of cultural heritage, theft and appropriation – and the realisation that it remains a shared task to keep the history and stories of women visible.

The title Trutz Simplex refers to Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen's literary character Courasche, a counterpoint to the same author's Simplicissimus and a female perspective on the turmoil of the Thirty Years' War. Herms thus takes up a work in which a woman in the 17th century appears as an independent narrator and figure of resistance: writing, speaking, surviving. This voice of female self-empowerment ties in directly with Herms' thematic focus on women writers and resistance fighters.

With the construction of her personal ‘city of women,’ Herms adds her own, almost cheerful chapter to the ongoing history of the dissolution of patriarchal structures – a space where the past and present of women writers meet.