VIENNA.- Moths, bats and worms are taking over Belvedere 21 and throwing the doors open to heretics and witches: Monster Chetwynd’s (ze/per) first solo museum exhibition in Austria interweaves art, (hi)stories, theory, craft and community to form an expansive work that was developed especially for the museum and will be activated and animated by a performance twice over the course of the exhibition.
General director Stella Rollig: Monster Chetwynd's environments are at once enchanting, burlesque, childlike and uninhibited. They overshoot the mark and offer a superb alternative to the rational rigour that our current turbulent times seem to call for, yet they are also imbued with all the explosive issues that define this historical moment.
Chetwynd’s cross-genre practice, encompassing film, collage, painting, and installation, combines elements of folk theater, pop culture, and surrealist cinema. Chetwynd is known for anarchic bric-a-brac performances with handmade costumes, props, and sets, often employing simple materials that are easy to use and adapt. The emphasis is on the collaborative process of creating the artwork. Chetwynd describes the artistic work as “impatiently made,” yet draws on carefully researched, diverse cultural references, ranging from Christine de Pizan to Silvia Federici.
The exhibition title Moths, Bats and Velvet Worms! Moths, Bats and Heretics! proclaims a forceful rallying cry, invoking objects and characters in the presentation: Belvedere 21 has become a habitat for nocturnal moths, bats and velvet worms, which populate wicker caves surrounded by puppets and sculpted creatures, medieval paintings and iconography.
Monster Chetwynd’s exhibition at Belvedere 21 weaves in numerous allusions and references that take a variety of visual manifestations in the space. The installation stars a motley cast of characters: the non-conforming, resistant figures of witches and little devils; Renaissance paintings by Barthélemy d’Eyck; vastly enlarged film stills; nocturnal animals; and even hand-sewn dolls depicting the feminist film-makers Catherine Breillat and Joanna Hogg. Chetwynd centres marginalised players from human history and the animal kingdom alike, overlooked narratives and entities that obtain strident yet comical voices and play their own parts in the show as handcrafted subjects. Among these marginalised figures are the title’s heretics: people accused of actions or statements that violate official religious doctrine, who are often said to have unmanageable magic powers and secret knowledge.
Silvia Federici’s groundbreaking feminist Marxist study Caliban and the Witch (2004) is a key conceptual reference text for the artist and contributes another meta-level to the performance: Federici argues that the fear of women’s bodies, medical knowledge, and (sexual) self-determination among patriarchal power holders was decisive in both medieval witch hunts and the beginnings of modern capitalism.
Curator Axel Köhne: Monster Chetwynd assembles a wide array of eras, narratives, and elements from both high culture and popular culture in this exuberantly fantastical imagery. With this mode of art-making, Chetwynd asserts a radical artistic freedom that transcends genre boundaries, forging captivating works that relish a spirit of play.
The exhibition is accompanied by the publication Monster Chetwynd: Moths, Bats and Velvet Worms! Moths, Bats and Heretics!, published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König.
