Holy Mare was a 40 minute long performance realized at Lilith performance studio in Malmö in the fall of 2024. The work ended up resulting in a 6 minutes long video work with the same title.
Signe Johannessens performance Holy Mare takes us down into a baroque tack room where bottomless needs for power, intimacy, and love are tested in relation to the untamed horse on the verge of abuse.
In the space, there is an unrelenting effort to stretch straps and relationships. Dry leather and moist skin are lubricated, polished, and inspected in an irreversible process.
In the performance Holy Mare there’s a form of madness that overshadows the care and nurturing. The ”mara” grows stronger in intervals, like a wave increasing in strength to ultimately rampage freely, then subsides, and the whole cycle begins again.
The title Holy Mare reminds us of how ”mare” refers to a female horse but also to a mythological female figure used to describe an uncontrollable state, a ”mara”. To be ridden by a ”mara” as in a nightmare.
Johannessen works with a speculative reshaping of hybrid bodies, relationships, historical narratives, and the potential of the posthumous. By combining episodes from her own biography and our shared history, her work renegotiates the sorrow and joy that intimate communities entail between humans and other animals. Concepts like family and kinship are expanded, and our relationship to the rest of nature is constantly present in her work.
