Dresses have stories to tell

White dresses are ever-present in my work. They are dressing me, inhabiting me through my performances and installations.

We spend most of our lives dressed. Clothes shield us as we eat, sleep, work, and return home. Over time, they become a second skin — absorbing traces of our lives through scent, stains, and the marks of wear. They hold memories, both intimate and invisible.

In the attic of my parents’ house, there is a box — my favorite one. Inside are belongings of my late grandmother: a small treasure chest filled with her undergarments. For the past few years, I have performed wearing them, as if, in doing so, I might bring her presence back into the world — allowing her memory to breathe again through my body.

I have also performed in several wedding dresses. The first one I found at a flea market — entirely hand-stitched, dating back to the late 1970s. I wore it again and again, until it eventually tore apart after many performances. I then replaced it with others, each one more special than the last.

As I put on a second-hand wedding dress, I cannot help but think of the woman it was made for — her youthful dreams, her hopes, her life as it unfolded. An old wedding dress carries so much within it. It stirs questions and emotions: Who was she? Did these stains come from dancing all night? And why, of all people, did I end up with her dress? Where did those long held expectations go and do I carry them now on my body? How much can I, and how should I.

The Prayer for Unfaithful Women, 2015

The are many stories about unfaithful women. For instance in my hometown in France, during Middle Age, unfaithful women were put into a cage and submerged into the river. If the woman was still alive after 10 minutes it meant that she was faithful.

The Prayer for Unfaithful Women is an art performance about women who consorted with German soldiers during world war II. They were humiliated and had their head shaved in public on the main square.

This art performance is a visual denunciation of the rage under the guise of an angelic prayer.

It is about French memory.

We carry with us from our history.

Andrée Weschler

Wild Flowers, 2001

by ANDREE WESCHLER (FRANCE) and CHUA KA-INN (SINGAPORE)

It started with collaboration between two artists and the landscape, a dialogue among the three elements. Having come from two very different environments, it was their first visit to the Kangnung landscape. Thus begins the communication between nature and human experience.
The intention of the artwork was to extract a line from the landscape, to make simply a drawing, adding or erasing. They started to rework the original beauty of nature, changing the form of the field of dried autumn flowers, according to the way the nature guides them. The flowers, the most beautiful part of the plant, were stripped bare, revealing only the once hidden thin dried stalks, stems painted red.
As the work progresses, perceptions became varied and interchangeable. New experiences, discoveries and visions became important in the process of creating an artwork out of nature. 
The idea was to create a sexual landscape, an exchange of nature with human nature. Where the beauty of the nature invokes in our senses a feeling of sensual desire, a desire to be one with nature, sexuality, a most basic pure form of human nature, is invoked in the landscape.

Anitya // Skandhas, 2015

A Collaboration with The Observatory & Elizabeth Lim & Andrée Weschler

ANITYA // SKANDHAS is the fourth in this ongoing interdisciplinary experiment, exploring the relationship between sound and other forms of performative expression. The Observatory and performance artists Andrée Weschler and Elizabeth Lim explore the Buddhist concept of the Five Skandhas -- form, sensation, perception, impulse, and consciousness. 

Sounds directly linked to physical movement and actions by the artists are filtered and manipulated by members of The Observatory. Connections and ruptures between sight and sound, cause and effect, are dramatically heightened, raising questions about the Skandhas, the true self and what makes us human.

As an art experiment, ANITYA // SKANDHAS feeds ancient concepts through contemporary practice to better understand the human condition.

Latent Spaces, Haw Par Villa Warehouse 

Pictures by The Idealist

Fragments, 2008

 This antique furniture belonged to Jeanne Weschler, the aunt of my father. She inherited it from her own parents, dating back to 1900. When Jeanne Weschler passed away in 1993, nobody wanted this dresser: it was too big, too heavy, and too impractical. My father asked around and I said that I wanted it. He helped me to install it in my apartment; I was still living in Europe then.

When I moved to Singapore, the only furniture I shipped over here, was this one. Then when I moved around, changed houses, apartments, countries, I always carried this heavy, big and impractical furniture with me. Each time the purpose of the furniture changed according to the place I was staying in.

Last year, I moved into a HDB flat. During the move, a helper broke the precious mirror into “Fragments”.

Andrée Weschler

La Carte de Tendre (The Map of Love), 2011

La Carte de Tendre was a French map of an imaginary land called Tendre produced in the 17th Century, which depicts the "geography of love" according to the Precieuses  of that era: the River of Inclination flows past the villages of "Billet Doux" (Love Letter), "Petits Soins" (Little Trinkets), and intrepid travelers brave the dangers of "Le Lac d' Indiference" (Lake of Indifference). The villages, roads, and topographic features in this allegorical representation trace the myriad facets of love and its associated perils. 

Lynn Lu and Andrée Weschler revisited the map of love with its successes and pitfalls and propose a new reading of the Carte of Tendre with video installation and performances art.

Ref. Carte de Tendre, 17th Century print, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Drawn by Melle de Scudery

Engraved by François Chauveau

  

Amputation, 2006

Amputation is an installation of medical tools hypothesizing failure as the naissance of healing: one needs to be sick before one can heal. The installation’s tools belonged to Andrée’s family doctor who was simultaneously caregiver and spectator to her and her family’s lives. This work is done in his memory

Singapore Art Museum

 

If you Imagine my Dear that ... , 2011

“If you imagine my dear that is going to last forever the season of love, you got it all wrong” are the lyrics of a French poem

Si tu t’imagines, by Raymond Queneau, written in 1950 and interpreted by Juliette Gréco.

The images and the material of the video & pictures are taken from a surgery the artist went through. The surgeon, after the surgery gave the video and said: “ Since you are an artist, I thought that you will be interested in it.” The trauma of the surgery over, it took three years to face the brutal reality of the images and dare to look at them and finally do an art work with it.

French poem translated in English:

“If you imagine, if you imagine, girl girl,  if you imagine, that is going to last forever the season of  the season of season of love,you got it all wrong girl, you got it all wrong

If you think my dear, if you think  that your rosy complexion, your hourglass figure, your cute biceps, your nails, your nymph’s thigh and your light-hearted foot, if you think my dear that is going to last forever, you got it all wrong girl, you got it all wrong

Beautiful days go away, the beautiful festive days, suns and planets, all turn in circles, but you my dear, you walk straight, towards what you cannot see, approaching very sneakily, the swift wrinkle, the heavy fat, the triple chin, the limp muscle, come on pick roses, the roses of life and may their petals be the slack sea of all the happiness. Come on pick, if you do not,  you got it all wrong, girl girl, you got it all wrong”

 

Some Flowers to Make it Look Beautiful, 2004

Flower n. 

1. that part of a plant that produces seeds.

2. the flower of, the finest part of

3. the flower of speech, ornamental phrase

Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English

 

Domesticated in her Animality, 200

“The video lasts 45 minutes. I look in the video camera as if it is a mirror. The video camera becomes a conduit from the private space to the public place.
I pluck my eyebrows, one hair after the other, one by one. At first the process is constructive, the eyes get bigger, the face prettier. But the process does not stop and suddenly removing hair one by one becomes destructive. 
A simple act of everyday becomes definitive.”

Andrée Weschler, 2002

The Venus in Furs, 2006

Video Performance

“It was a large oil painting, done in the robust full-bodied manner of the Belgian school. Its subject was strange enough. A beautiful woman with a radiant smile upon a face, with abundant hair tied into a classical knot, on which white powder lay like soft hoarfrost, was resting on an ottoman, supported on her left arm. She was nude under her dark furs. Her right hand played with a lash, while her bare foot rested carelessly on a man lying before her like a slave, like a dog”

Venus in Furs, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (page 59, Blast Books, New York)

 

The Hairy Virgin

The Hairy Virgin is a true story of a girl whose entire body was covered with hair. She was introduced to the King Charles the 4th, Emperor and King.

In his book “Histoires Prodigieuses”, Pierre Boaistuau explains that during her pregnancy, the mother of the Hairy Virgin had seen a statue of Saint John that was covered with animal fur. With the power of her imagination, the mother “transferred” the hair onto the body of her forthcoming baby. The maternal imagination has the power to shape the progeny, it is called the “monstrous imagination”.

“A hairy virgin was shown completely covered with hair like a bear; she was born thus deformed and hideous because her mother had gazed too intensely upon an effigy of St John dressed in animal skins which hung at the foot of her bed when she conceived.

It is certain that these monstrous creatures most often are the consequence of divine judgment, justice, punishment, and curse; horrified by their sin, God allows [women] to produce such abominations because they hurl themselves forward indifferently, like savage beasts that only follow their appetites, with no consideration of age, place, time, and the other laws established by Nature”

Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires prodigieuses, 1560

The Choir, 2003

I don’t know how to explain my art. I don’t know how to tell it. If I try, I have the impulse to be faithless, to betray it, to empty it, to steal its soul. When I look at my work I read it; my artwork talks and responds to me. We were “one” for a while but now it is one by itself. It is not me anymore. Nevertheless there is still a lot of me in it. Sometimes I am uncomfortable, other times it bothers me, I feel unveiled, and some other time I am surprised. To explain it is giving to the origin of the artwork.

Where does the idea come from? I don’t know where my ideas come from. They come from the fact that I am born that winter in 1963 in France, that I grew up in a little closed village in Alsace, that I am the third child of a family of four, that my father is my father and that he gave me what he gave me, that my mother is my mother and that I love her for that. That my mother tongue is French but I was cradled in “Alsatian” (German dialect). That I drink coffee in the morning and that I eat what I eat. An idea is a chemical reaction that I cannot explain. I find. I create. When I worked on this project as I always do I was living and breathing through it. All I was perceiving, reading, seeing, dreaming was through it.

Sometimes I have ideas that are like explosions coming out from my pores.

I believe in a conceptual instincts.

In this work I talk about my childhood, the world I come from. The Sunday masses, women sitting on the left benches, men sitting on the right benches. The aisles in the middle. I am telling my childhood, what I saw, what I heart, what I perceived.

My dreams.

My reality.

Andrée Weschler

 

Black #02

Black #02 is part of a  series of performances using the colour black. The material for the Performance Art is a pair of  Black Stocking and Red Shoes. The initial inspiration of the performance is a memory of Weschler's childhood:

 "In 1975 I was 12 years old, I was still a child and not a teenager yet. It was the seventies, the era of the platform shoes and wide-legged, flared jeans. I wanted to wear stockings with my skirt and I asked my mum to buy me a pair. Fashion for   children at that time was limited and it was difficult to find a pair that  would suit a 12 year old’s skinny body, they were either too big for a child or too small for a woman. My beloved mum bought me the smallest pair she could find. I tried them on and   they were too big for me that I could squeeze in all my body inside except   for the head. When my mum asked how they were fitting me, I remember that I replied that they were great and I walked in front of her with my platform shoes, the torso and two arms inside the stocking

An artist conveys images"



The Need for an Alteration, 2011

Video, 2011

The video is part of a series of works named Black that started with the performance "Black #01"  in 2010 at The Substation for the Night Festival Singapore. The colour Black talks about happiness