Some would say that to be a woman is to long. For what exactly it is difficult to say; the target shifts continually as one approaches. In New Waiting, a recent collaboration between artist Sophie Jung and curator Juste Kostikovaite, the idea of longing is taken as the starting point. More specifically: female longing in the digital age, which is a new, headless kind of beast.
The installation is introduced with a scene with Vladimir and Estragon from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, but the latter name is replaced with Estrogen. Otherwise, the words remain intact. The replacement of Estragon with Estrogen is telling: Estragon is the fall guy, the dunce, the complainer and the forgetter—the shameless one. That the role of the stupider, weaker character is replaced with the hormone integral to “femaleness” is telling and sets the stage for Jung’s “private onesie-purgatory of infinite, weightless waiting”.
VLADIMIR:
It’s for the kidneys. (Silence. Estrogen looks attentively at the tree.) What do we do now?
ESTROGEN:
Wait.
VLADIMIR:
Yes, but while waiting.
ESTROGEN:
What about hanging ourselves?
VLADIMIR:
Hmm. It’d give us an erection.
ESTROGEN:
(highly excited). An erection!
VLADIMIR:
With all that follows. Where it falls mandrakes grow. That’s why they shriek when you pull them up. Did you not know that?
ESTROGEN:
Let’s hang ourselves immediately!
VLADIMIR:
From a bough? (They go towards the tree.) I wouldn’t trust it.
ESTROGEN:
We can always try.
The Luxembourg-born and London-based artist’s practice routinely addresses representation and its pitfalls, both personal and cultural, as seen in DOUBLE, her joint exhibition with Shana Moulton, and her performances from Learning About Heraldry at Ceri Hand Gallery. With New Waiting, Jung turns her sharp eye to the tropes of historicised feminine obsession, examining what it means to be a woman and to long in the modern world in a new “virtually emoticised” state of waiting. Smart but water-damaged devices wait in heaps of uncooked rice at the gallery floor while its walls are filled with the echoes of a yodel, understood as “an ancient alternative to the high-frequency 24/7 just-aboutness of fb/twitter/insta/gmail messaging hysteria”.
Exhibition photos, top right.
