The Exorcism Collection

The Exorcism Collection is a 7,5 meter long slanted shelf. It holds a passe partout covered with glass. The collection consists of paintings and drawing on canvas and paper. The presentation explores the relationship between attraction and madness, ecstasy and performance, sexual control and patriarchal power relations, through studies of the pose “full arch”. A woman standing on her knees with an arched back, her sexual organs exposed. The pose is aimed at the gaze of the viewer and it signals both submission and control.

The pose appears throughout art history, in depictions of religious ecstasy, demonic possession and in the pathological term “hysteria” as well as in contemporary popular culture, where female pop stars play with the borders between sexualized power and the objectification of the male gaze on stage and in videos. The fierceness, the staged ecstasy is at the same time is both alluring and a balancing act on the verge of insanity.

In Ditte Ejlerskov’s paintings a complex study appears, where the physical pose and its double implications are repeated until they stand out as a practice of exorcism, a process of expulsion. The repeated act is at the same time the subject used throughout art history as a proof of the function of exorcism and the treatment for “pathological hysteria”. The artist plays with the ideas of what contemporary demons the female pop stars are trying to exorcise with their poses and what is to gain in the staged performance.

Text by Katarina Sjögren and Jun-Hi Wennergren Nordling
(For the exhibition Full Arch at CRYSTAL November 11 - December 17, 2011)