Halla Einarsdóttir (1991) is fascinated by myths and stories and their effect on our language, knowledge, and communication. She primarily researches the ways in which myths and stories have been used throughout history to impose rulership and uphold the balance of power. By interlacing various stories and sources in her performances, videos and sculptures, and partially fictionalizing these, she wants to oppose unambiguous views and perspectives and remain open to multiple versions of reality. She finds inspiration for this in the writer Hélène Cixous’s feminist perspectives on the emergence of ever-present, but previously unheard voices. In her work, the Icelandic Einarsdóttir often acts as a narrator who, like some kind of medium, receives myths and subsequently passes these on.
At Prospects, Einarsdóttirs is showing a video recording of the performance Borborygmus (2023). It features the artist as a kind of ventriloquist who summons characters from the past — such as madam Krarer, a swindler and teacher who lived around the turn of the century —, and allows them to speak through her stomach. She wrote the following about this: “People thought the noises produced by my stomach were voices of the unliving. And so, I allowed them to take up residence in my stomach and although none of us spoke borborygmus at the time, I felt it in my body when my stomach growled that the word was coined onomatopoeically. Borborygmus: a rumbling or gurgling noise made by the movement of fluid and gas in the intestines.”
Text: Esther Darley
Translation from Dutch to English: Marie Louise Schoondergang