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Worlding Hilma af Klint: An attempt at cartography


Teresa Mayr, Bauhaus-University Weimar

 

 

Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was a painter and spiritual medium. Her artistic work is rooted in transcendental contact: In 1906, the voices af Klint communicated with, commissioned her to create „old paintings" or „astral paintings", which were gathered together under the title "Paintings for the Temple" (HaK 431, p. 65 & HaK 418, p. 125, cited from Voss 2020, p. 211).

 

In my imagination, the "Paintings for the Temple" are pictorial birth canals. Af Klint’s pictures express a reality for which there is perhaps (still) no language and no model. She compared the pictures „to cells, they [...] would spring from the same force that drives growth in nature" (HaK 431, p. 65, cited from Voss 2020, p. 354). Abstract forms bud and change constantly in exchange with the universe, jump back into figuration and oscillate symbolically between macrocosm and microcosm. Just as Hilma af Klint painted for a future (cf. Bashkoff 2018, p. 12), perhaps her paintings actually tell of a possible future – she experienced it clairvoyantly.

 

Drawing and writing, in my doctoral thesis I speculate about this world, which may be coming and which may have been announced with and in af Klint's paintings (cf. figures). I call this world ‚Pangaea-U'. I visualize Pangaea-U using Hilma af Klint's paintings, „rendering sites into sequences" (Probyn 1990, p. 184): Following her utopian ideas, I imagine myself wandering along the lines she painted. I imagine that af Klint's pictures are snapshots, sections of a world that I expand and extend with my drawings. Drawing, I build corridors between her pictures, intermediate worlds, backsides and undersides. I form a prismatic fleet that ahistorically crosses against the „deadly fantasy" (Haraway 1995, p. 79) of a white and capitalist Western narrative.

 

We do not create a feminist art history when we juxtapose the great masters of great art with great female masters. Not only is the lack of „canonical 'great mistresses'" (Thompson 2020, cited from Ryle 2022, p. 28) the result of structural and institutional exclusion – the hierarchies of this valuation and of values themselves are fundamentally patriarchal. Similar to af Klint's notes and visual language, my drawing work eludes any logical argumentation and quantifying research method of a rationalist and potentially „macho"-science (cf. Milevska 2013, p. 165). My drawings are embodied processes of thought and imagination, partial perspectives, rooting deeply in a queer feminist objectivity. According to Hilma af Klint's ideas they show visions that aim to avoid binary oppositions and broaden the view of af Klint and her work; in a flashing and far removed from the pigeonhole of ‚pioneer of abstract painting' Hilma af Klint then queers and plows the canonical modernism. Born from Hilma af Klint's images Pangaea-U reminds us of the possibility of a kaleidoscopic past, present and future.

 

My contribution is designed as a lecture performance. While I talk about Pangaea-U, a picture show is on display. The drawings show my visual approach to Hilma af Klint, her artistic work and the world model I speculate on the basis of it.

 

Keywords: Drawing Research, Worldbuiding, Science Fiction, Alternative History, Queer Feminism

 


Biography
Teresa Mayr was born in Friedberg/Bavaria in 1992. From 2012 to 2019, Teresa studied fine arts at Dresden University of Fine Arts, Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle/Saale, Academy of Fine Arts Munich and Berlin University of the Arts. In 2019 she graduated as a master’s student of Prof. Ina Weber at UdK Berlin and has since been working as a freelance artist. Currently Teresa is completing her Ph.D. at the Bauhaus University Weimar, where she writes and draws a science fiction story about the artist Hilma af Klint. Teresa Mayr is based in Berlin.