Sara Möller | About Longing
"Leaving Sara Möller's exhibition at hand a first time, I immediately gather a handful of the best snaps from my phone and express deliver them within the hour to Vienna and namely to a friend not priorly acquainted to her work. This is one of those people with whom you may or may not have been more intimately linked to in the past and whose words in the aftermath of a certain bond-age will probe a curiosity not afforded just anyone, just as it will similarly meet your respectful scrutiny and not get a mañana-mañana reception. They duly praise her work and without any apparent judgment attribute it as very feminine. This begins to strike a chord with me since despite having followed Sara's work over the years, sometimes from closer view and other times at an arm's length distance, I have never actually thought the thought myself. Meret Oppenheim's quintessential sculpture Ma gouvernante – My Nurse – Mein Kindermädchen or Louise Bourgeois's Arch of Hysteria of equal grandeur strikes me as being feminine or informed by feminine iconography. Sara's body of work at large has rather often appeared genderless to me, the way Bourgeois's spiders also deceptively do at first, until you realize at inspection, that they are a representation of maternal power and reproductive force, rebuffing that initial fallacy of the non-binary. And if you're big on your popcultural cult trivia, that spider is really the high-brow art reincarnation of the 'bigfoot' in the Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. I think a while about what to make out of the gaze on, at face value abstracted and amorphic sculptural shapes like those of Sara's in this exhibition. I think of how inherent biases (or the lack thereof) play such a pivotal part in whether they are vegetative shapes more akin to the realm of flora, or if they more of than not bear rather the presence of the gendered human body."
/ Ashik Zaman, C-print
