ABOUT THE SHOW
The 28-minute-long QM, I Think I Call her QM, 1997, deftly weaves together elements of performance, video and installation art. While the film borrows classic cinematic narrative technique, with its ostensible focus upon a female psychiatrist living in a squalid Manhattan brownstone who wakes from a dream one morning to find a strange mud-covered creature beneath her bed, closer inspection reveals a radical blend of genres: it is both a relationship drama between a mother figure and a daughter figure, and a mystery, an enigma to be solved. It also has elements of the horror film, with moments of Hitchcockian unease; for the real location of the drama is the dark recesses of the soul.
The genesis of the film is itself fascinating. In 1993, Siden visited a house just outside of Greenwich Village, New York, to work on an exhibition project alongside five other artists. The previous occupant, a psychiatrist called Alice E. Fabian, had died the year before, leaving her mark on the house's interior through the objects and traces that still remained there: her psychiatric journals, a many-volumed personal diary, cassette recordings, Polaroid photographs, scribbled graffitti on the walls. Alice E. Fabian, it became clear, had been engaged in a heroic and atrociously lonely struggle against encroaching madness. "Someday someone is going to take on my case", Fabian had told her daughter several years before her death, but little could she have known that it would be a Swedish artist quite unknown to her who, profoundly moved by the traces she had found of the dead woman's life, would take up the gauntlet. Following a series of installations, shown not only in the house itself but also in the Nordenhake Gallery in Stockholm, the film QM, I Think I Call her QM, brought to a close the cycle of pieces inspired by Fabian.
The fictional figure of QM - the Queen of Mud - has been with Siden since the late eighties. She is something of a symbolic figure that contains both a creation story and a science fiction - of unknown age and origin, the mute QM, who shows all signs of being of the female gender, has both mammal features and reptilian mud-covered skin. Realising that QM was like an ill-fated sister to her other creation, Dr Ruth Fielding the character inspired by Fabian, it seemed only natural to Siden when devising the film that she should allow the two to meet. Thus, the Queen of Mud, played in the film by the artist herself, becomes a visitor in the Manhattan house of Dr Ruth Fielding and, in so doing, comes to represent the psychiatrist's alter-ego, as the part of herself she has swept under the carpet and which returns like a Golem.
Despite having been exhibited extensively around the world, including at the 14th Sao Paulo Biennale and the 1999 Carnegie International Show in Pittsburgh, USA, this is the first time that QM, I Think I Call her QM, and indeed Ann-Sofi Siden's work, has been shown in the Czech Republic. With the chance to show this disturbing and thought-provoking film, the JIRI SVESTKA GALLERY is delighted to have the opportunity to introduce this extraordinary artist to a central-European audience.