16/07/2020 - 12/09/2020
CINNNAMON, Rotterdam
"Our bodies are confined, our sense of self is wrapped in skin, we understand our body as an integral whole, hardly aware that we breach the borders of this wholeness every day, absorbing foreign matters into our bodies, literally incorporating them, simply because we need to eat to stay alive. It should not be a surprise then, that eating has such spiritual and ritualistic significance in many cultures.
In the video work 'dadduckdead' from 2016, Spierenburg takes a spin on this notion by eating the beak of a plaster duck. This work stems from a dream that Spierenburg had, in which her father ate a duck’s beak. Now the duck returns in a new work, ‘Revisiting the father’. The duck lies in a transport box, on white tiles that have been carefully placed on a piece of faux fur plushy fabric. Dead, as if it were ever alive, it presents as a relic, or a mere remnant of a ritual. Once ‘activated’ in a performance captured on video, it found its ‘forever home’ in a curiously domestic wooden transport box."
-excerpt from exhibition text by Pieter Dobbelsteen