La Femme de Nulle Part
doggerfisher
Edinburgh, Scotland
23 Feb – 28 April 2007
works by Anita Di Bianco, Sophie Macpherson and Rosalind Nashashibi
Curated by Lucy Skaer

by Rea Cris

doggerfisher’s current group exhibition, featuring work from Anita Di Bianco, Sophie Macpherson and Rosalind Nashashibi and entitled “La Femme de Nulle Part (The Woman from nowhere)”, brings together work which references the fin de siècle malaise of women wandering off the beaten path. The show is curated by the artist Lucy Skaer, who has previously exhibited at doggerfisher and who also appears in Anita Di Bianco’s film Disaffection and Disaffectation, which leaves a bit of an incestuous taste in the mouth.

Disaffection and Disaffectation was actually the strongest piece in the exhibition; based around Jean Genet’s play “Les Bonnes (The Maids)”, where housemaid sisters Solange and Claire daydream sadomasochistic rituals around their mistress, whom they murder along with her daughter. Sharing and mixing the lines of three characters between two actors, the film is shot in a claustrophobically small boudoir overflowing with open cupboards and perfume-filled dressing tables. It is the first piece one encounters when walking into the exhibition and Di Bianco’s second film, “Studies for J”, is the last. Sandwiched in-between are the works of Macpherson and Nashashibi in a comparatively brighter room. Other reviews have talked about the claustrophobic nature of the exhibit as a whole, set off instantly by Di Bianco’s film, but the sense I encountered was of a space that is abandoned and forgotten from memory; as if these films had been playing forever, waiting while the art works collected dust in anticipation.

While recognizing the ‘visual clues’ to the unsettling claustrophobic atmosphere of D&D, I didn’t bite. Rather, I really enjoyed this piece and found it the best of the whole. I like the sporadic reciting of the lines, rich with words and phrases long gone. I enjoyed the mélange of bad and good acting, at times exaggerated, at times sincere. D&D reminded me of high school drama class where the young adopt roles at the same time too complex for us to understand and exaggerated enough for them to easily contort. These remembrances brought me to think of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”, which I was assigned to act a small scene of in literature class; I forgot the lines that highlighted the importance of the scene and play as a whole. Possibly Ibsen’s play wouldn’t be so removed from this exhibition with Nora Helmer cross-stitching herself into the ideal of perfect womanhood only to realize that she too has strayed off the path.

http://www.doggerfisher.com
http://www.anitadi.net/bio.htm
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/lucy_skaer_biography.htm

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