Ingrid Calame: Being Born

I don't remember, but ...

Over 20 people: Children, teenagers, adults, friends and colleagues, both male and female, were interviewed by Ingrid Calame in her volume "Being Born" about their knowledge of their own birth. These naturally extremely personal conversations are accompanied by image excerpts from frottages with pigment on Mylar, which the artist created in 2014 in a cistern at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Lacoste, France, and in 2015 at the Zeche Zollverein in Essen, Germany. The shadowy, colourful works direct the viewer's gaze from the inside out, as it were. As if flooded with sunlight, cogwheels, ruts or metal ribs appear alongside indefinable traces and unevenness in some of the pictures in others. The narratives are no different for the reader: on the one hand, the stories of terrifying crash births, on the other, legends with almost mythical content. This sounds both touching and frightening, but is then repeatedly broken by the humour that runs through most of the family stories. The volume is currently the only available single publication on the work of the abstract American painter, who was born in New York in 1965 and now lives in Los Angeles. In 2014, she was represented in the anthology "Painting Today" by Tony Godfrey; she has become known for her radical style, which is orientated towards human legacies, stains and graffiti, a kind of cartography of human traces.