Elke Auer and Esther Straganz: / The Queen of Eggs

05 March 2010 > 26 March 2010

The exhibition will present the selected works of Elke Auer and Esther Straganz: the neclace Queen of Eggs/In honour of a legend and photographs, object I Am Not A Venus But A Worker of the Anus and photos and digitalized slideshow with sound Inside the Diamond sea.

I Am Not A Venus But A Worker Of The Anus is a wearable sculpture. The object – the monster phallus was found in the woods of Ibirapuera Park in Sao Paolo, Brazil. They believe that it was a masterpiece by the great Mapinguary, a well-known hairy biped monster living in the Amazon rainforests. Attached to a pair of tights they had worn it  for their mini performance Dick Waving Contest (2008) at the Biennale Pavillon during the Sao Paulo Art Fair. They were posing proudly with the strap-on and once in a while waving friendly to the art-lovers. The neclace Queen of Eggs is believed to be a trophy. It was  made by the formidable time traveling Queen Of Eggs, who, as legend has it, collected the seven hairy eggs over a period of 500 years. They say that the excellent connections of their friend the Mapinguary made it possible to show the necklace in Austria for the very first time in the exhibition Hey Bastard, Turn Me On!‚ Cause Some Things MustBreak Now. For the Photo-shooting of In Honour Of A Legend they have used a well done replica, with eggs as tight and plump as they must have been some hundred years ago.

Video Inside The Diamond Sea, shown all over the world, is about becoming outrageous bodies, using the technique of knotting flesh with cardboard and to sound out what bodies can do, or to say it with Elizabeth Grosz, to play with the actuality that: "There is an instability at the very heart of sex and bodies, the fact that the body is what it is capable of doing, and what any body is capable of doing is well beyond the tolerance of any given culture."

Elke Auer (1980) and Esther Straganz (1979)

have been working together since Year 2000. They both studied at the University of Applied Arts in the class of Karel Dudesek and Peter Weibel and graduated in 2005. In 2007 they co-founded the group GirlsOnHorses together with Eva Egermann and Julia Wieger, with whom they were also running the emancipatory speakers forum "PostProloClub".Recently they are working first and foremost on and with monsters. In 2008 they assembled "The League Of Extraordinary Bastards" in Sao Paulo, Brazil. A handful of monsters were recruited to deal with questions of normativity and desire, radically extended, stretched, knotted and fragmented bodies, subject constructions, and drag.

Photos: Jasmina Klančar