For the performance and installation Women and Watery Men, Johanna Ackva and Carrie McILwain used a two weeks residency at DISPLAY in order to pursue their practice of bathing and talking together. Fluid conversations about cultural and personal history arise and reflect upon intimacy, shame, notions of purity and dirt, as well as upon the conditions of speech:

What can be said and what not? Who has spoken? How does the speaking about bodies, gender, and hygiene manifests shame and paradoxical limits? The bath as a site of intimacy spills into public and audience space, through the invitations to eat, witness and listen, while the conversation floods to a physical and sound communication within the space. The video shown after the night of the performance contains fragments from the hour-long baths which the artists took in the kitchen with their guests, invited to share the same bathwater but also their thoughts and ideas. It was displayed in the bathtub that had hosted these voyages.

Referencing the similarities between the scent of cheeses and that of sweaty bodies, McIlwain and Ackva articulated the experience of the sense of smell through the different associations that it can bring to mind, linking a disagreeable aspect of the body’s processes to the pleasurable one of consuming cheese: in the process, illustrating the ways that elements of the external environment become internalized, and vice versa. (…) The ways in which spaces are occupied by bodies, and in which bodies occupy spaces—physical space as well as that of thought and speech—were presented, dissected, and reflected upon through both personal and collective forms of expression.

Julianne Cordray on berlinartlink, Aug 18, 2016

Concept & performance and video: Johanna Ackva & Carrie McILwain | Guests: Florian Feigl, Juan Felipe Amaya Gonzalez, Josephine Brinkmann, Max Hilsamer, Zwoisy Mears-Clarke | Curation: Marie DuPasquier, DISPLAY BERLIN | Photos © André Wunstorf and Johanna Acvka.