There is no such thing as a naked body in Anna Stahn's exhibition Stars in the hair. On the contrary there is hair, lipstick, nails, oysters, dresses, shoes, books, letters and a psychedelic eyeless doll lying on a daybed reading.
When going through Stahn's exhibition you may realize that she is a material girl. An artist mostly concerned with all that superficial stuff such as clothing, tight scarfs, pearls, color, textile, clay and paper. Stahn works in plural and it is by creating situations, vibes and through her staging of crumpled awkwardness of being in an inescapable and material world, that she, with humoristic sensibility mimic both the casual and the absurdity of understanding any kind of interior as social and the body - just another thing to furnish around with.
Entering the first room, the hallway of Stars in the hair you'll find a wallpaper of shoes. In the next room; a hand sewn fetish doll in furniture fabric, next to the doll a bookshelf full of books with notes and underlines. In the kitchen oysters are trying to escape the plate that they've been served on. Walk from the kitchen through a hallway decorated with portraits that are like posters, diary drawings or napkins, leading to a room where Stahn has created her own little architecture of modernist looking houses and handbags. In the last room (the balcony room) a light table decked with love letters, wigs, pencil cases, findings, haunted heirlooms, and little useless tools for getting ready to enter the world through a hair shaped curtain on the balcony door.
Stahn has an archiving (and literary) approach to the work - stacking, pilling all the traces that she herself has created to detect vanity and trough vanity, also the intimate.
The whole exhibition is like a sculptural moodboard. The figures, the sculpting, the teeny-tiny feminine figurines are both stilted and fragile at the same time. Stahn draws a very physical universe, materializing feelings spanning pettiness, humiliation, nervous- and awkwardness, lust, desire, greatness, and the power of being dressed in just the right way not to get caught.
- Mai Dengsøe
