Souziehaas: The Eye Has to Travel

The Eye Has to Travel stages an intimate, almost disturbing portrait of the life of the artist, souziehaas. In her work and her vibrant celebration of Camp, souziehaas explores the role of women and gender in society. Drawing from the ambiguity inherent in her own identity and body (Madonna or whore?), souziehaas challenges reductive categories not only in her artwork, but in every element of her life. The exhibition’s title, The Eye Has To Travel , references one of the most influential women of the 20th century, Diana Vreeland (1903 – 1989). Souziehaas is fascinated by iconic women such as Susan Sontag and Vreeland, and, as an artist, fashion designer and stylist, brought a comparable grandeur to many fashion, film and art projects.
“The essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric – something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques,” Susan Sontag wrote in her essay Notes on “Camp” (1964). Camp is not a genre, but an aesthetic sensibility, often subversive, that manifests itself in a proud excess, playfulness, stylization and caricature. In her work and attention to materials, arrangements, implied narratives and viewing context, souziehaas reshuffles aesthetic sensibilities, questions gender conventions through the use of soft and hard “feminine” textiles and colors.
Camp found a particularly rich arena of expression in film: its aesthetics were popularized by filmmakers such as Andy Warhol and John Waters, including the latter’s Pink Flamingos, Hairspra and Polyester. Hand in hand with souziehaas’ exhibition in July 2013, an extended Camp-inspired film series will be programmed across the weekly Mindpirates film nights on Wednesdays.
For her upcoming solo exhibition at Mindpirates Projektraum, souziehaas has conjured her visions and artistic sensibilities and materialised them into a carefully arranged fantastic surreal cosmos. Akin to the series of “apartment exhibitions” which she realized throughout the last few years in the form of installations of her artworks in other people’s private homes, every detail and placement is meticulously thought through. The viewers find themselves immersed in her cosmos, a space bathed in bright baby blue and baby pink light, in which fabulous sculptural creatures and richly detailed installations act as autobiographical stations in the complex narrative of her role(s) as a female in society from cradle to grave. Her choice of materials – from plastic to silk and letters embroidered in gold – for her installations, challenge the gender connotations they carry. Therefore it can be said that souziehaas plays with the performativity of these materials, defies their haptic expectations and orchestrates her unique vision of high and low into a dazzling Camp Gesamtkunstwerk.