untitled

2-parts

C-print, sanded, embroidered

titled, dated, numbered and signed on lable on verso

In her photographic works Maria Hahnenkamp analyses the media treatment of the female body and forces a critical examination of its status in our society, especially with regard to its handling in the media.
The sanded-down photographs are the most radical early work and unite the two themes that run through Hahnenkamp's work: her distrust of the (media) "image of woman" and her distrust of representational media in general.
The caption to a 195-part photographic work reads: "Gelatin layer sanded down to the paper carrier using a drill and grinding attachment, fine grinding by hand". In a radical act, the artist eliminated all the content of the photographs, which originally showed a woman receiving beauty care. The radical gesture of robbing photographs of their pictorial representation and reducing them to their supporting element is one of Hahnenkamp's reactions to the media's appropriation of the female body.
The wafer-thin gelatine layer of (analogue) photography as the absolute carrier of information is, as a consequence, repeatedly the site of technical interventions, the one between acceptance and attack of this ambivalent photographic surface. Hahnenkamp also perforated and embroidered photographs with found Catholic ornaments (1860) or tore the ornament out of them.
(Ruth Horak in: Maybe I should spend hours …, Werkschau XXI, Maria Hahnenkamp, Fotogalerie Wien 2016)