Superamas, Photo Performance
Artist’s book
Our engagement
Curatorial development, follow-up of design & production process, distribution, promotion.
Content description
Anyone who already holds on to what takes place on stage as a succession of stills and as it were flicks back through them, is naturally open to the medium of the cartoon strip. So it seems only logical that Superamas has now published Photo Performance with Imschoot Uitgevers.
On high-gloss paper, the typical Superamas personnel romp around in three handy books in a smart box: a woman in make-up and leather as “Cat Woman”, a long-legged, big-breasted woman in a swimming pool and women in high heels and mini-skirts. And apart from this, smooth guys who could have escaped from an American early evening TV series. But what happens to these standard dream figures of an over-sexed society, where they spend their time and how they express themselves, has nothing at all to do with the cheap screen-plays of the soap operas.
In the three photo performances, Superamas dispenses with such obvious means to create a meta-level such as the quote from a Derrida text at the end of “Big 3rd Episode” (“I often ask myself the question, why? why insist on deconstructing something that is so good?”). The distancing view of the stories will become clear in any case. Thus the photo performances effortlessly join the Superamas oeuvre: perfectly formed, with the easiest accessible surface, amusing through surprising switches from the normal to the obscure or the other way round, and nevertheless leaving more questions open than they answer.
Technical description
A box that contains 3 books: Cat Woman, 52 pages full colour. Maine 150g / The Chamber of Ancestors, 60 pages full colour. Maine 150g / I Have Always Dreamed of Having a Cherry Tree in the Garden, 36 pages full colour. Maine 150g.