Ingrid CalameBeing Born

I do not remember, but …! In her volume “Being Born,” Ingrid Calame questioned more than 20 people – children, adolescents, adults, friends and colleagues, female and male – about what they know of their own birth. These, needless to say, immensely personal conversations are accompanied by details of frottages in pigment on Mylar that the artist produced in 2014 in a cistern of the Savannah College of Art and Design in Lacoste, France, and in 2015 at the Zeche Zollverein in Essen. The colourful works, which appear ghostly and shadowlike, direct the gaze as it were from the inside outwards. As though flooded with sunlight, indefinable traces and unevennesses appear in some of the pictures, cogwheels, wheel ruts or metal ribs in others. The narratives confront the reader in no different a way: on the one hand the stories of frightening precipitate births, on the other legends of almost mythical content. This sounds as moving as it is alarming, and yet again and again it is broken by the humour that runs through most of these family tales. The volume is currently the only single publication available on the work of the abstract American painter, who was born in New York in 1965 and lives today in Los Angeles. In 2014 she was included in Tony Godfrey’s anthology “Painting Today”; she has become known for her radical style, oriented towards human residues, stains and graffiti, a kind of cartography of human traces.