THE CRUEL WOMAN – Coalmine Winterthur, 2024

curated by Annette Amberg
January 26 – April 07, 2024 – link to Coalmine

In the first exhibition space, Nadja Abt presents an installation as a theatrical space. She critically and humorously spins a web of references to classical literature, avant-garde film and queer love. In reference to the former cellar of the Volkarthaus, where the Coalmine is located, she further refers to the ongoing entanglements between capital and art that are inscribed in the lives and work of artists – including her own.
As a sort of guide, a colorful strip on the walls runs through all the exhibition spaces. It is a reference to literature and to the Suhrkamp Bibliothek (library) book series published by the renowned German publishing house of the same name. Bound with covers designed by Willy Fleckhaus featuring the iconic ribbon are those books that have been included in the literary canon as classics of modernism. This nod to the Suhrkamp series is also a reference to the library, which is located at the Coalmine Café and contains hundreds of copies of the publisher’s books. This is because in 1951, the company Gebrüder Volkart AG with Georg and Peter Reinhart granted a loan to the publisher Peter Suhrkamp through the mediation of the author Hermann Hesse. In the following year, they became shareholders in Suhrkamp-Publishing House, which they remained for over 50 years.
The book covers are juxtaposed with collages on metal stands entitled Obsessions (2022-2023), which examine (queer) desire in cinema. The artist edited and commented on film stills from cult films from the 1960s to 1980s such as La Piscine (1969), Diva (1981) and The Cruel Woman (1985). Obsessions is both a critical examination of the cinematographic representation of desire, which is characterized by the male gaze, and a homage to the female actors and directors of the time.
The interplay of gestures, glances and comments is enhanced by a woman’s voice that emerges from the red-lit cabinet. It is the voice of the renowned Swiss actress Esther Gemsch, who performs a sharp-tongued monologue by Nadja Abt as The Cruel Woman. The text interweaves quotes from Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea (1808), Sports Play (1998) by Elfriede Jelinek and Lisa Robertson’s Proverbs of a She-Dandy (2017) with the artist’s own reflections on the agency of women, capital and sinister machinations to create a 6-minute thriller.

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