50000 Witches
Noga Shatz_ Solo Exhibition
Text by Dr Lee Weinberg
50,000 witches exhibition represent a turning point in the artistic practice of Noga Shatz, a queer, feminist artist, living and working in London. The exhibition is a milestone in a long-term research process Shatz had embarked on following her experience of isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic. The exhibition explores how different facets of women’s representation in the history of art and culture are cemented in our subconscious in the gestures, techniques and modalities of painting as an artistic medium. The name of the exhibition is a gesture towards the 50,000 people that were prosecuted, tortured and executed throughout the history of Western Europe for being witches. Through the re-invention of her painterly language, Shatz is re- visiting and re-imagining the figure of the female body in an attempt to reconstruct our understanding of it.
In contemporary research and interpretation of historical documents from the 16th and 17th centuries, the time most associated with witch hunts around Western Europe and the UK, it has become clear that the definition of a ‘witch’ had very little to do with actual concerns over the practice of witchcraft. Rather, ‘the witch’ was a symbol created by the different orders of Christianity to propagate the extinction of women who lived on the margins of the social order: women who chose not to marry, women who might have been queer, or different in their sexual orientation and gender identity; women with various disabilities, or women that did not adhere to Christian religious conduct and rule.
Much like any other hate campaign, the figure of the witch was intentionally a grotesque representation, that looked to demonize women and justify violence unleashed against those who resisted the patriarchal order and refused to subordinate themselves to systems of normative power. Such women naturally looked for alternative ways of living, often supporting each other in enclosed communities. Looking at these histories from a contemporary, feminist perspective, these women as heroes of their time. However, the voices who tell their stories and the memory of their bodies have been drowned, tortured and distorted.
Through a feminist queer lens, ‘witch hunts’ are a blatant example of the silencing of ‘the other’; a testimony to the grave conditions under which women had to live throughout most of Western history and the little possibilities and freedoms they had in directing their own lives.
Their lives, therefore, are only what they internalized them to be. The fascination with this process of demonizing queer and other women trough the figure of the witch had sent Shatz on a journey of re-examining and questioning her identity as an artist, her use of symbols, materials and formats to convey her experience as a queer female artist.
“I imagine, if I lived in those times, I would have been hunted, as an artist, as someone who is female, and queer, never exactly conforming to social conventions. At the same time, I was hopeful to find models – stories of women who could testify to their experience, and their point of view. I wanted to bring these stories to life through my paintings.”
In the process leading to this exhibition, Shatz filled her living space and studio with stories and images of women, which penetrated and flooded her subconscious mind – images of witches, mythological creatures and monsters, depicted as female figures of symbolic importance throughout Western art and cultural history– painted, engraved, sculpted. As the research and the process progressed, also started to appear lists of rules and restrictions that limited the voice, gestures and expression of women.
Shatz immersed herself in this universe, looking for evidence that will prove the existence of subjects, persons, behind the images, the myths, the monsters, the muses and the simulacra. Searching for an affinity with these women who somehow were able to leave a trace in the margins of history, through occupying masterpieces created by men. As she is re-reading those images – in search of signals, gestures, micro-expressions, that subverts the male gaze and exposes the vulnerable subject beneath the representation. The paintings in this exhibition all emerge from that deep subconscious ocean of imaginaries. In that vast blue- green-purple landscape, the artist is looking for things – undefinable things that were buried, that have drowned and forgotten.
While on this journey, Shatz realised that much of the subversive energy that could help her resurrect the subjectivities of the women behind Botticelli's Venus, Sir Peter Lely Susanna or Cavaggio’s Medusa, women whose faces and bodies we know so well, is not in the image of the body, but in the apparent distortions of the female body in the effort to confine it to the male perspective and the model’s gestures that could not be erased. This made her think about her painting process:
“I suddenly realized that all I know about painting I know from the point of view of men, that most of my inspiration comes from male artists and male writers. I came to a point where I was not sure any more who I was as an artist. I asked myself, how would I be painting if I had an alternative influences when I was growing up… I wanted to liberate my painterly language from the restrictions of what looks right and wrong according to those standards… This necessarily meant to confront the limitations on my body and what it is allowed to be… I look at the paintings of men, and I am almost envious of the freedom that they allow themselves. Their gestures are unhinged, open, while I feel that my body is already molded into a limited set of movements”
The artworks presented in this exhibition are the result of that desire to liberate the painterly language of the social restrictions within which the female body is allowed to exist. The painterly language thus looks to question the consistency of materials and their use in the construction of the relationship between the subject and the background, the image and the ground from which it emerges. In what seem to be the traces an almost alchemical process, the use of paint, over diluted, or over condensed, highlights the fluidity, incontrollable aspects of the paint in relation to the stubborn and hardened format of the canvas. The painterly shape and format of the canvas are questioned, in an attempt to liberate the figure from the flat surface of representation. The canvas is freed up from the frame, allowing the image to change as light and the shade dance between the fabric’s curves. This process of deconstruction brings focus to the sims of the canvas, to the margins of the paper – in direct relation to the obsessive social preoccupation with the margins of the open, fluid, porous body of the subject, that experiences itself outside of the representative framework it has been assigned to in our shared cultural memory.
As an exhibition, this project looks to explore the tensions in the need to be a sealed body, a body that hides its weaknesses, secretions, desires and pores, always stitched and completed, controlled and restricted. The paintings are intentionally left un-finished, leaving space for the margins to rip, for the skin to peel against the internal desire to fully embody the potential of the fluid sense of a self. This internal image of the body, lives inside the memory of models, mythological creatures, monsters, witches, animals and other companions that live in the margin of the social realm and offer an alternative to violence.
2023