Recycled Life of Ophelia, installation, 2024.

“Her clothes spread wide / And mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up; / Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes, / As one incapable of her own distress, / Or like a creature native and endued unto / that element” (Shakespeare: The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Gertrude’s Description of Ophelia’s Death)

Shakespeare’s Ophelia is one of the most helpless characters in literature. A victim of the futile strife going on above his head, she fled into self-surrender from the crossfire of irreconcilable forces. It has been following her for five hundred years, and she is finally reaching the Pest quay. Wandering along the banks of the Danube, she finds a discarded bathtub, which she moves into and perhaps finds final peace in the middle of the climate disaster.

Development – Hommage à Elizabeth Siddal

Elizabeth Siddal became known as the muse of the Pre-Raphaelites, even though she herself painted and wrote. She exhibited with the Pre-Raphaelites in 1857 and 1858, but the critics of his time did not deal with her. John Everett Millais’ Ophelia was considered one of the world’s greatest paintings, for which Siddal was the model. More precisely, she lay for hours in a bathtub in Millais’ London studio. Siddal caught a bad cold in the cold water. Her life ended in a similar tragic way as Ophelia’s: she died of a drug overdose at the age of 32, committing a major suicide. Siddal published the book of poems My Ladys Soul only 156 years after her death, in 2018. The photo performance associated with the installation “The Recycled Life of Ophelia” commemorates all those muses who were not recognized as artists in their own time, and at the same time, they show solidarity with all artists who have drifted to the periphery.

The artists appearing in the photos:  Elisabeth Siddal, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Francesca Woodman, Romaine Brooks, Dora Maar, Kati Horna, Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, Camille Claudel.