HIDE-AND-SEEK: JANICOT AND SOLTAU

In an era when women are still seeking equality and freedom, the online exhibition ‘Hide-and-Seek’ looks to two female artists – Françoise JANICOT and Annegret SOLTAU – whose performance-based practices are characterised by their efforts to conceal and reveal.

 

Working in similar yet separate contexts in the early 1970s – Janicot emerging from the volatile period of civil unrest in France punctuated by major public demonstrations and economically crippling strikes, and Soltau from a Germany still feeling the reverberations of World War II – both artists, despite training in other mediums early in their careers, embraced the then-nascent medium of performance. 

At the heart of Annegret Soltau’s practice is an inexhaustible search for identity and meaning. Born shortly after the end of the second world war in Germany in January 1946, the daughter of a soldier who she never knew, Soltau has spent much of her adult and artistic life searching for his identity, and through extension, her own. From 1967 to 1972, Soltau enrolled on a painting and graphic arts course at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, Germany under Hans Thiemann, Kurt Kranz, Rudolf Hausner and David Hockney, attending classes at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in Austria once she completed her studies in Germany. Her paintings and drawings from that period, few of which survive today, demonstrate the artist’s early interest in encasement and wrapping, wounds and healing.

 

Her characteristic use of black thread, with references to both domestic life and the ‘thread of life’ that connects birth and death, emerged out of experimental performances in the early 1970s when Soltau would wrap participants in black cotton fibre, slowly tightening until the point of disfigurement and pain. This set a precedent in her work with thread appearing in various forms throughout her career, from photographic documentations of her actions to later perforating photographic portraits, mostly of herself, with a needle. One senses the desire for freedom, for emancipation, to be cut free. Applied with the precision and delicacy of a surgeon, drawing on Soltau’s role as a doctor’s assistant, one can also sense the desire for healing, literally stitching oneself back together.