Maria Petschnig: Nineteen Videos

Petschnig’s projects often simulate voyeuristic encounters; the camera and the subject, the directed and the staged squirm somewhere between invited exhibitionism and forced voyeurism. Questioning hierarchies of vision, her videos never grant the viewers the pleasure of simply watching. Instead, they are reminded of being complicit in their gaze and made aware of what remains unknowable or out of view. Likewise, the domain the artist establishes in many works is one that emphasises this ambiguity of ‘public’ and ‘private’. In addition to a number of essays and interviews, Nineteen Videos features a preface by Christopher Y Lew, associate curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Other contributors include Natalie Bell, Travis Diehl, Barbara London, Joshua Sandler, Wendy Vogel and Genevieve Yue. SELLING POINTS:

Nineteen Videos richly illustrates the work made between 2002 and 2014 by New York-based video and performance artist Maria Petschnig.

Through her lens, Petschnig captures a fetishised, disquieting and humorous world, realised in dry, dark fantasies and crude dystopias.

Depicting an awkward kind of eroticism, her powerfully provocative video pieces employ a keen understanding of the body and sexuality to invert subject-object relations.

Petschnig posits a contemporary response to historical questions of identity politics, while avoiding an easy alliance with third-wave feminism’s reclaiming of sexuality as power. 97 colour illustrations