Talaya Schmid

Liquid Cuntry, 2023
Environment with site specific wall painting, mixed media installation, 14 x 7 x 5 m

Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka

With her space-filling installation Liquid Cuntry, Talaya Schmid creates a place where visitors can flow with her works of art, penetrate its elements, be circluded by and interwoven with the Liquid Cuntry. It is a celebration of fluidity and change and sets a counterpoint to categorization and borders. A boardwalk leads to a tent past one of the tufted work Infinite Pool of Love and Juices. Underneath is a freezer with so called Rocket Ice Cream. Guests are invited to lick a popsicle while strolling through the environment. The 20-minute Soundscape Body Fluids is part of the installation in form of a surround sound experience. This is a collaboration with the music producer and DJ Belia Winnewisser. A mixture of explicit love poems, personal stories and sounds of water that flows, drips and splashes.

Talaya Schmid's immersive environment is a homage to the cunt and all its liquids. Cunt is an ancient term that encompasses the whole gynecological sexuality and anatomy, external and internal, including labia, vulva, pudendum, vagina, and clitoris. Thus, it accounts for and allows female sexual pleasure. Etymologically, Cunt connects to kin, kinship, cunning, thought, cognate, cognitive, knowing, knowledge, king, queen and country. It has very positive, powerful roots and is about 2400 years old. The artist painted on a museum wall the mysterious figure of "Sheela na gig", she is the embodiment of big vulva energy.

Talaya Schmid sees the re-appropriation of this positive and life-affirming, original meaning of the word Cunt as an empowering and healing act. Connected to this is also a social attitude towards this body part, towards women and sexuality. We learn sexual behaviour and gender performance, thus, they are both part of our cultural production and we must take them seriously and value them like we value other forms of culture. In this regard, seeking sensual, sexual and societal healing, becomes a political act by exploring the role of intimacy, individual freedom, and artistic practice.

In Talaya Schmid's Lebenskunstwerk we enter a landscape of desire. It is not a possessive-sexual, but it is an erotic-aesthetic desire. While possessive desire is virtually blind to the individuality of the other person, eroticism is different. It “gives us the power”, writes the author Audrey Lorde, “to change things in the world.” Talaya Schmid gives us the moment to experience erotic desire with all our senses.

Kuratiert von Paolo Bianchi und Christoph Doswald