Overleveringer – kropslige erfaringer på tværs af tid

Abstract

The article “Handing on – Bodily Experiences Across Time” investigates how body and time are significant elements in the sculptural practices of the Danish artist Kirsten Justesen (b. 1943). The article presents a methodical approach to Justesen through the embroidered body-map made by the Danish artist Gudrun Hasle (b. 1979). The body-map is a “handover” of Justesen’s body; scars, marks of life and the body as a tool in works of body-art. It sets a different focus than that of a linear and chronological structured storytelling: it becomes sensual and bodily in an aesthetic processing of political and feminist experiences. The article finds its theoretical grounds in a concept of feminism’s timing and queer temporalities, and articulates how knowledge production and the raising of a feminist consciousness can be handed over through a bodily approach. Questioning the thinking of “feminism” in waves and generations, the article discusses how both artists relate and articulate a storytelling about women’s and art history, situated from the common grounds of being “woman”, “artist” and “pregnant”, with all the privileges and challenges that Justesen and Hasle each have had. The main focus of the article lies in an analysis of Justesen’s work CIRCUMSTANCES (1969-) and how it can be mapped out; how time and body in space can be connected over and across time as a quality within CIRCUMSTANCES, as well as an issue which continually challenges the concept of the “work of art” as an closed entity. Justesen’s use of the body as a tool and sculptural material linked to the political circumstances of the 1970’s paved the way for a different viewpoint and representation of the female body. As Hasle builds on these bodily and gendered experiences in her own practice as an artist and in her exhibition THOSE BEFORE ME, she sets new grounds for the art historical narratives to be told from.