Inhale, Exhale

Performance work by Sunneva Ása Weisshappel

In the performance Inhale, Exhale performed at an exhibition series called Sugarwounds.

We, the female artists, who exhibited at this group exhibition, share a common vision and have kept the group active together, to reflect each other and participate in the Icelandic art community. By that, we gained a platform to deepen our art theories, practice, method, expression and techniques by supporting each other, debate and criticise.

The artist of this application was placed in a human sized plexiglass box, wearing showgirl bodysuit. Four women, in an organized chain, carried kitchen utensils filled with sugar. They poured 170kg of sugar into the box until the sugar reached the artist´s nostrils. Almost drowning the artist in sweetness. Then, the women sat down around the sculpture (plexiglass box) and watched the artist struggling to catch her breath, engulfed in the sugar and the powder particles from it. In this performance, I am suffocating in sugar by the women I trust the most. 

The performance plays with the idea of a female body as a sculpture that gets manipulated by other female bodies. An investigation of isolation, suffocating, perseverance, trust and mistrust through women´s culture and society. Sugar represents something that is sweet like success and beautiful things. I realized by surrounding myself with too much sugar that it brought me a sense of claustrophobia, loneliness, isolation, emptiness, the feeling of confinement.  By performing this metaphor, I provoked my own grasp of life, breathing.  Am I the one manipulating my surroundings by putting myself into this situation, or am I reclaiming my own control of suffering?