Andreas Beitin

Mouth, lips, tongue, and teeth—speech, pain, and screech—eating, swallowing, spouting off, and spitting—lust and passion: the oral cavity is an extremely stimulating zone of the body, in the truest sense of the word. Science and medicine are not the only fields that have investigated it, though. From antiquity to the present day, art and cultural history have done the same. The Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg has pursued the wide-ranging path of this motif’s history in order to present the first comprehensive show about the mouth in the fall of 2020. The companion publication offers thematically dense essays that not only allow the reader to delve into the topic, but also go far beyond the exhibition itself. The mouth, its inventory and abilities, are closely examined through film history, ethnology, literary theory, and architecture.

A multipronged analysis of the Dominican American artist’s cartographic palimpsests In her monumental paintings and installations, the Dominican American artist Firelei Báez (born 1981) creates images bursting with symbols from folktales, colonial occupation, legendary creatures and revolutions. She paints images on top of maps, book pages and found ephemera that combine abstraction and figuration, personal perspectives with grand historical narratives and Caribbean mythology with science fiction. This colorful publication serves as an introduction to Báez’s work. The artist discusses how she interrogates powerful concepts such as truth and history throughout her practice. Special attention is paid to her “palimpsests,” paintings on top of colonial maps or construction plans for colonial architecture, both of which represent the establishment’s notion of objectivity. Inspired by Báez’s works, poet Warsan Shire and author Katrine Rasmussen Kielsen contribute texts considering the legacy of colonialism.

The photographs, videos, installations, sculptures, and new VR works by Louisa Clement (*1987) deal with phenomena related to a sense of disturbance in times of political and social inse- curity. Clement’s investigations prove to be as seductive as they are cryptic: What is a human being in a digital age in which the body’s integrity is increasingly questioned through vehement medical and technological interventions? In an almost surreal manner, Clement’s detailed photographs conjure up a new image of the body that also represents the ambivalent vision of a “new human being.” With the help of her photographs, taken with smartphone cameras, she examines not only the medium’s ability to reproduce images, but also the reality of the technologically modifi ed human. This publication is a companion to Louisa Clem- ent’s fi rst museum exhibition.