Schönheitsfamilienwahn
In her work Anette C. Halm stages the female body, traditional role models and female protagonists in literature and art history. She addresses and exaggerates kitsch and triviality of the artificial world, women have to face every day. In her work ”Schönheitsfamilienwahn“ the artist also deals with the relationship between mother and daughter – her own as well as the abstract one. Halm’s daughter is actress and object of her photographs; thereby reflecting the mother-daughter- topic in a very multilayered way.
The daughter’s dreams and wishes mirror on the one hand the mother’s unfulfilled dreams and wishes. On the other hand they reflect the needs and dreams of the daughter and her generation, which the artist and mother indeed is very down on. Accordingly Halm incorporates the commercial character of various TV- and Castingshows into her photo work, like the Voice, DSDS, Germany‘s Next Topmodel. Everybody is a star: Anette C. Halm criticises the media landscape, which leads adolescences to believe in the fulfilment of their wishes, yearnings and dreams and which exploits their naivety, playing with their feelings in order to reach high ratings.
The photo series in ”Schönheitsfamilienwahn“ take place in very different locations. The daughter slips into several roles for the artist to explore the female mindset and dream worlds based on pictorial worlds of photography and movie, using the daughter’s body.
In abandoned premises the artist and her daughter reenact past fates of literary characters or real women, referring to the ghost-photography of close of the 19th century. The depiction of these women in historical clothes by the artist’s daughter is supposed to immunise the portrayal against the hollowness and falsehood of the contemporary lifestyle. A comparison to the American artist Francesca Woodman is intended. The photographer has staged herself and other women in ghostly scenarios for many years.
Halm is also interested in quite personal moments of these portraits – the intensive cohesion between mother and daughter, the special moment on the growing up of her daughter, while both face each other on equal terms and suddenly the daughter enters the mother’s art as a woman and both start to construct it. Following this intent, Halm uses the camera and its possibilities and takes advantage of the photos inherent and romantic promise to capture memories.
Lifestyle management for adolescences, body-shaping, self-optimisation and body-standardisation – facilitated by the media, these pictures enter in mental normalisations. Anette C. Halm dwells on these processes. Her work is about the dreams and wishes of young people, which however can also live within a mother. Mothers pursue ambitiously the daughter’s carrier as model or actress and follow their own unaccomplished dreams at the same time, incited by an industrial dream factory.
Mother and daughter work together. They combine true events with fiction. The model (the daughter) puts herself in a person’s role of the respective story. Then she poses with an appropriate outfit at the particular location in front of the camera. The disguise (different sunglasses, wigs and costumes) and the technique of the multiple exposures offer the daughter protection and don’t reveal the daughter’s identity. Halm refuses to present the personality of her daughter and private details of their mother-daughter-relationship to a medial public, unlike in works of Irina Ionesco or Sally Mann. Thus Halm creates a splendid image space, where intimacy, production and fiction meet playfully, but privacy isn’t exposed.
(Nadine Bracht & Wolfgang Berger)
