A PHRENOLOGICAL SELF-PORTRAIT

Norway | 1976 | 13 min

Very much in fashion in the late nineteenth century, phrenology established itself on the cultural and scientific scene as the medical doctrine that allowed understanding individual inclinations departing from the observation of skull morphology. Marianne Heske goes back on this forgotten science to make one of the most iconic self-portraits in seventies video art. The artist interacts with her double recorded on a monitor, wondering whether there are immutable truths in science and if the values in which we currently believe will pass the judgment of history, while also reflecting on women’s identity and representation. As with many other women artists of the same period, for Heske “video becomes a means to re-flect, express, and question obsolete paradigms of representation as well as to reinvent an artistic genre, self-portraiture” (Laura Leuzzi). (s.c.)