2023, 4-channel video installation, 35 min.

For the Kunsthaus Hamburg exhibition hall, Rosanna Graf produced the expansive 4-channel video installation Ordinary Women - Carrier Bags of Friction. Female rage is the key element underlying this body of work which, based on numerous references to film, literature and media, explores the deconstruction of long-established role models.

Right from the start, fragmentary scenes evoke associations with the horror film genre and fantasy literature: four women are lured by a fifth into an undefined space reminiscent of the classic haunted house. Together, they embark on an exploratory journey through this liminal place. Along the way, given social rules and norms gradually cease to apply. The protagonists are inspired by women who caused a great stir in the media during the 1970s and beyond. Infamous figures such as RAF terrorist Susanne Albrecht, German-Bolivian guerrilla fighter Monika Ertl, and actress Ingrid van Bergen shocked the public with revenge, murder, and resistance. References to these role models can be discerned in the characters’ costumes and text. One of them recites from the SCUM Manifesto by the American radical feminist Valerie Jean Solanas, who seriously injured Andy Warhol with a gunshot a few months after its publication. Another proclaims her visions, similar to the martyr and French national heroine Jeanne d’Arc.
Regarding spiritual guidance, the group is led by a witch played by Rosanna Graf herself. However, her pledge to cleanse the women of their uncontrolled emotions is not fulfilled. The anti-heroines' anger escalates through deliberate provocation while their gaze inevitably falls back on us.

While the cliché of the furious, unaccountable, or hysterical woman still exists, anger is not seen as a taboo in men but rather as a sense of morality. In response to this paradox, Rosanna Graf turns female rage into a transformative force. Defying media authorities, female-connoted clichés, and outdated attributions, she affirms a self-determined femininity. By reverting to the symbolic figure of the witch, the artist addresses the centuries-old stigmatization of independent women and draws parallels to the present day. Since the Middle Ages and even to this day, people who are thought to have magical powers have been denounced, persecuted, and murdered. Rosanna Graf counteracts the male-dominated, mechanistic worldview from which this discrimination derives with spiritual motifs such as the mandrake. Countless stories revolve around this medicinal plant, which, according to myths, possesses magical roots. With its deafening scream, it becomes a symbol of self-empowerment in the video.

The exhibition title, in turn, playfully alludes to the feminist history of technology conceived by visionary science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin. In her 1986 essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, she places women collectors’ carrier bags used to provide a livelihood for the community at the center of the narrative, thus undermining the linear mode of heroic storytelling. What if humanity’s primary inventions were not phallic hunting and combat weapons but carrier bags – simple containers such as the basket of wild oats or a medicine bundle? In reference to this proposition, the clichéd handbags of “ordinary women” in the video become symbols of repressed potential. What happens when we ultimately give in to our anger? Which boundaries can be crossed, and which systems are shaken if we collectively raise our voices? It is, after all, narratives that determine how we look at and interpret the world.

Cast:
Ella Fleck – The Actress
Rosanna Graf – The Antagonist
Sophia Kennedy – The Journalist
Cristina Negucioiu – The Saint
Paulina Nolte – Mädchen
Jasmin Truong – Inkognito

Camera: Levente Pavelka, Goscha Steinhauer
Music: Sophia Kennedy
Costumes: Leonie Falke
Sound Mixing: Nikolaus Graf
Assistance: Laurens Maria Bauer, Laura Franzmann
Scenography: Jakob Engel, Rosanna Graf
Thanks to: Studio Mondial, Konrad Baumann

Curated by Anna Nowak


Produced for Kunsthaus Hamburg, 2023
With the support of Hamburgische Kulturstiftung, Claussen-Simon-Stiftung and Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa, Berlin.

Ordinary Women – Carrier Bags of Friction, 2023, 4-channel video installation, Kunsthaus Hamburg; installation views (Photo: Antje Sauer/Rosanna Graf) and video stills

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