For lust there was the pig, for cowardice the hare

Galleri Blunk, 3 November - 5 November 2023

For lust there was the pig, for cowardice the hare presents three new works by Tara Fraser. The exhibition unveils a secondary inquiry in a research project investigating female-led funerary rites, pathology, and performance. The works presented here emerged concurrently but address distinct themes. Here, questions of spectacle, vocality, and propriety, latent in the broader project, are divulged and negotiated directly. The installations entwine fragments of a personal archive with telephony and cinematic iconography to construct an unnerving eroticism in which intimacy is mediated and negated. 

In Mother Love the spectacle of the female as portrayed by Marlene Dietrich in the pre-Code drama Blonde Venus (1932) is staged. Her duelling archetypes, and the alleged depravity imbued therein, confront one another. Viewed alongside Théâtrophone, in which a man’s desire for a child born of his younger lover is recast, the audience is asked to consider the socially redemptive potential of motherhood. In Shangri-La, an intimate scene is coolly recollected. Originally performed on-call via telephone as part of Ask for Rose (2023), the narrator caricatures feminine performativity and passivity. Together, the works speak to conflicted realms of gendered performance.

Mother Love, 2023

Digital print, MDF, acrylic paint, chain 

Théâtrophone, 2023

Audio 1’11”, telephone

Shangri-La, 2023

Video 3’33”