Objects Sculptures Installations
Pieta de la Place du Marche, 2005
installation
exhibition Femme(s), Geneva
digital print on PVC
mounted on an aluminium frame
317 x 440 cm
"Pieta 2003" was imbued with a new life when it was presented in the exhibition Femmes/Women in Carouge/Geneva at the occasion of the 10-year jubilee of the World Conference of Women in Beijing and the decisions taken there.
A woman, seated with a white rag doll on her lap in the middle of a main traffic street in New York – which she is oblivious too – says in a symbolical way goodbye to a phase in her life: youth or innocence?
The work can be seen as a metaphor for existential aspects of her life.
The specific location, Place du Marche, is an active square in the centre of the city of Carouge. This location asked for a large format of the work in order to become a logical component of the market square.
The sculpture was installed on the long side of the square, close to the church, on the first floor level above a cafe. Because of the site, a traffic area and a church square, the meaning of the religious opposed to the worldly was emphasized. A translation/adaptation of an icon from Catholic belief was literally placed on the street and thus revealed its meaning much more intensely. But such a discussion was very understated due to the subtlety of the sculpture itself.
Literally speaking the work also called to mind two different cities: Carouge and New York. Thus symbolically a window was opened towards another part of the world. This emphasized the starting point of the exhibition: ‘The position of women in the world at large’.
2011 © rinihurkmans