Description
Paper is one of the most ubiquitous yet overlooked objects in everyday entanglements of gender and the politics of violence (as sites/practices of (in)security, identity, (il)legitimacy). This research project explores paper through US veteran artist Jenn Hassin’s work which collects personal artifacts with ‘embedded histories of trauma’, (trans)forming this material into paper and then art. Centring two of her works – ‘Molting’ and ‘Absence, Presence, and the Details In Between’ – this project unravels how this material materialises/dematerialises/rematerialises otherwise gender and the politics of violence. In ‘Molting’, Hassin (de)clothes herself in a ‘dress’ of paper pulp handmade from the clothing she was raped in, mixed with her loved-ones’ clothing, matte medium, buttons, and gold thread. Performed in an acrylic box that replicates a single mattress using water poured from a porcelain (pulped) paper cup, ‘Molting’ unravels the body, gender and sexual violence through their de/re/materialisation as embodied, disembodied, reembodied spaces and subjects. Absence, Presence, and the Details In Between displays “remnants” from this “performance”, the traces of the dress hanging, the spectre of the box-bed inverted, a shard-laden typewriter and water-stained porcelain-paper cup mounted atop.
In-betweenness pervades.
O u t l i n e s.
Figments.
Fragments.
D i s comfort.
This piece itself is an unravelling, intersecting fragments of found poetry, visuals, and vignettes of sexual violence and trauma scholarship. It is an unravelling that doesn’t seek to ‘put together’ but to sit in/with that pulp, that fragmentation, that de/re/materialisation, that discomfort, that dis/re/embodiment to unravel other knowings of sexual violence, militarism, and trauma.
