Marianna Simnett's 2014 FVU commission The Udder shows as part of a group show, Performing Society: The Violence of Gender, presented by MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST, Frankfurt am Main. The show uncovers the violence that lies concealed in normative constructions of gender, presenting artists who each develop a counter-narrative to the institution of the family as the foundation of the heteronormative society.
About Marianna Simnett's The Udder:
If childhood is a land of milk and honey, it is also a place of demons and ghosts. In Marianna Simnett’s short film The Udder, the mammary gland of the title doubles as a kind of memory machine that plugs us directly into that heightened, reverberant universe. Shot on a robot dairy farm in rural Sussex, and conjuring extraordinary performances from the people who live and work there, Simnett’s magic-realist tale considers the increasingly technical process of automated milk production as the site of an elemental struggle between the forces of purification and corruption; forces that loom equally large over a much more personal rite of passage, in which halcyon innocence is shadowed and clouded by the uncertainties of puberty.
