For the work Paula and Helene, Liliana Zeic made use of two photographs discovered within a collection of prewar slides, now stored at the Institute for Forensic Medicine in Wrocław. This particular collection, assembled during the interwar period with material originally housed at the Institute for Forensic Medicine and Scientific Criminology in prewar German Breslau, includes file cards, photographs, and diminutive pedagogic publications in leporello format. Box No. 11, labeled “Women and Androgyny,” contains two slides featuring Paula, clothed in one, naked in the other. Two such photographs of Helene were found in the archive amidst a loose collection of photographs, their slides presumably lost.
In reproducing their figures at adult scale on textile resembling skin, the artist guides us closer to their corporeal nature, to the reality of their being. Tangible presence allows the figures to throw off the base status of “anthropological curiosity,” as Mathias Foit terms it, describing the way in which the medical establishment, in photographing their naked bodies, strips them of dignity and a right to privacy. The artist simultaneously sketches an overarching context for sexuality research generally.
Employing the format of leporello—an accordion publication—influenced by pedagogic materials discovered in the archive, the artist intertwines multiple threads: the tactility of the archive itself, and scrutiny of the language used to describe each “case” within the pedagogic material.
The text references research conducted by Richard B. Goldschmidt on the intersexuality of butterflies. Goldschmidt’s findings, frequently cited by scholars connected with the Berlin Institute for Sexual Science, corroborated emerging theories of human sexuality and gender.
One of the those who referenced Goldschmidt’s research was Magnus Hirschfeld, one of the preeminent sexology researchers of the first half of the twentieth century and founder of the Institute for Sexual Science. For Hirschfeld, such scientific verification of sexual fluidity among butterflies likewise established that homosexuality and transgenderism among humans was naturally occurring. Butterflies thus became crucial to the study of human sexuality—indeed, taking up residence at Hirschfeld’s institute during its first year. Did these count as his “cases”? At any rate, in detailing them in academic publications, Hirschfeld established the butterfly as symbolic representation of scientific advancement and of considerations of human sexuality. And, in 1929, a species of butterfly was even named in his honor: Perrhybris lypera Magni Hirschfeldi.
Liliana Zeic strings together fragments, images, impressions, and research like so many beads on a string. A twine of archival contents, knowledge, imagination, and imagery shapes the complexity of time periods, identities, and relations, while further establishing the necessity of liberation.
Expert consultation: Mathias Foit
Leporello graphic design: Anna Wacławek
phot. Alicja Kielan
