Carnesky, Marisa: Jewess Tattooess

Carnesky, Marisa: Jewess Tattooess

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Title Jewess Tattooess
Type Theatre, Performance, Solo show, Satire, Body-art / Live-art, Lecture performance
Date 10 October 2002
Venue Cankarjev Dom
City of production Ljubljana, Slovenia
Production City of Women, Festival NOW99, Nottingham
Co-production Kapelica Gallery
Language English
Format 720x576 pxl
Duration 43' 34"
URL http://www.cityofwomen.org/sl/content/2002/projekt/potetovirana-zidinja
Registration number KAP-2002-PERF-125
Number of works in a group 2

Synopsis

‘Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor tattoo any marks upon you: I am the Lord.’ (Leviticus 19: 27–28)

 

Jewess Tattooess is an interdisciplinary solo performance piece by live artist Marisa Carnesky exploring the Jewish taboo against tattooing in relation to the artist’s own Jewish cultural heritage. It examines Jewish superstition, folklore, religious rituals, and symbols to create a performance language that combines actions and movement, film and video, live performance video projections, original electronic sound and music, installation, fairground illusions and storytelling. It also incorporates an action of live tattooing.
During the Holocaust, the Nazis tattooed the arms and stomachs of millions of Jewish people incarcerated in the concentration camps. This act specifically and deliberately contravened Jewish law as proscribed in the Torah (note the above quotation). Jewess Tattooess explores the cultural and religious implications of a Jewish woman who, by choice, is heavily tattooed—tattooed not as a numbered victim, but as an autonomous individual.


The work draws on images of traditional tattooed ladies as exhibits in sideshows, Jewish folklore, fairy tales, and storytelling. It explores the historical archetypes of the Wandering Jew, the Jew as Nomad and Outsider, and the Jewish Diaspora.


The non-linear nature of the narrative reflects the tattooed woman’s physical body: a body of pictures and symbols; archetypes; living illustrations of memories, dreams, nightmares, and ghosts.

 

… »Carnesky’s voice and her body tell the many, interwoven, dramatic stories of those who both belong and do not belong, bringing into the open unresolved, and strikingly actual, conflicts of ownership, enforced identity and cultural displacement. At the same time, her voice and her body talk also of the freedom that the reclaiming of a shared experience bring to all the invisibles who transit through lands and through history; of the journey written in her own DNA, deeply in conversation with an history that is as much her own as common to many. … If Rapunzel is a sex-slave, forced to give up her body, her citizenship and her humanity, the Jewess Tattooess is like a magician purposefully reclaiming her captive soul through a bleeding star of David.« (Betti Marenko)

Source: City of Women

Sodelujejo

Acting (theatre/film) Marisa Carnesky
Directed by Marisa Carnesky
Illustration Alex Binnie
Editing (film, video) Alison Murray
Editing (sound) Dave Knight, Katherine Gifford, James Johnson
Production Festival NOW99, Nottingham
Support London Arts Board in Arts Council of England
Costume design Nicola Bowery
Design Rose Parnis

Artist, artistic group

Group of artworks

Carnesky Marisa, Jewess Tattooess, Festival NOW99, Nottingham, Ljubljana, 10 October 2002, 55' 19"
Carnesky Marisa, Jewess Tattooess [interview], Ljubljana, 10 October 2002, 57' 48"
Carnesky Marisa, Jewess Tattooess, Festival NOW99, Nottingham, Ljubljana, 10 October 2002, 43' 34"

Production

City of Women
Festival NOW99, Nottingham

Co-production

Related from the AV archive

Artwork
Carnesky Marisa, The Girl from Nowhere, Ljubljana, 16 October 2002, 48' 43"