Pleun Gremmen (Netherlands) has interdisciplinary practice in research-based visual art, design and theatre, through the building of virtual worlds, installation and performance.
The Wandering Womb (2023) - The Wandering Womb is the first of a series of excavations into the poetics of creation. Through the sculpting of a fictional cosmos, the work's virtual world plays in the realm of unconscious images, inquiring the relationship between reason and unreason in creation. Sculpted alongside a temporal and spatial labyrinth of creatures, the anthropomorphic divinity in the external panel of Bosch's ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ and its ‘from nothing’ [ex nihilo] formation is confronted with a complex web of self-creating matter. Tracing a genealogy 'from the deep' [tehom], the shifting gazes of the Wandering Womb traces a dialectics of 'God's eyes,' or 'Archimedean Point,' playing between the dynamics of 'masculine' and 'feminine' creation, reason and unreason, and the dance of divinity and matter to the enduring question of where we come from.
Hysteria Narratives (2021) - An 8-minute narrative exploring the lack of medical research in womxn bodies through early medical texts and the myth of the wandering womb. As an animal within an animal we wander through a virtual body. The work was born out of “This work might contain nudity, do you want to proceed?” (2020), the result of a residency at the Internationales Frauen*Theater Festival, Frankfurt am Main at antagon theaterAKTion.
“Almost pretending to be a film for scientific use, Hysteria Narratives by Pleun Gremmen is an immersion inside a dreamlike female human body, punctuated by the words of a hypothetical patients who complains of the symptoms of the disease described as hysteria. Four video reconstructions of explorations of female intestines with a tube retrace the history of hysteria and its exploitation to define the sexist intellectual, physical and moral inferiority of women.” – Metronom Gallery, Modena Italy, 2021
