Subterfuge

Leda Bourgogne’s work inhabits a borderzone between painting and sculpture. In this zone, she consistently experiments with materials, subjecting the relation between canvas and body to close examination, engaging with interdepencies and with the constructedness of identity. Bourgogne’s work for the Kunstverein’s annual editions centers on the figure of the weaver. Here, the weaver is a figure of resistance and subversion, but also a producer and creator. To embody this duality, her collages here overlay historical photographs of trickster figures with mythological and literary-theoretical texts. For Subterfuge, Bourgogne uses a straw and liquid ink to create arbitrary, wispy creatures. Capacity deals with social ascriptions of gender, with the figure of the Black Widow sewn into a bleached velvet landscape. Taking Shoshana Felman’s Reading and Sexual Difference as a starting point, Bourgogne here asks how we might conceive of a female literary subject independent of pre-existing male/female dichotomies, not least their associated structures of madness and reason.