Das Leben am Haverkamp

Shana de Villiers invites you to enter the bedroom of Frankie, a shapeshifting creature-character that some would call: monster. Frankie is both fragment and whole; you and me. Through this intimate and theatrical installation, Shana explores queer post-colonial identity and shame. Despite the stratification of being, shame is a thing we all carry.

With a collage-like working method, Shana draws on their monster archive: an ongoing collection of clippings, images and internet memes. It ranges between creatures from Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings, a teletubby with an aged face, a female bodybuilder or mutated sea creatures. These images form the basis for patchworks, sculptures, wearable objects and performances, in which they unravel and question normative structures. Like a seamstress, they transform found textiles, images and text fragments, in which the arbitrary criteria of what is classified as normal or monstrous are examined.