Ursula Hübner :
Lady Venus For Willendorf

The showcase in the Wachau region is reopened for a new Venus and becomes the stage for Lady Venus von Willendorf: a stage, a screen, an altar. A hovering and a sinking, reflecting and absorbing, glamour and wildness, feigned shyness and flashing humour are terms for the eroticism that preoccupies me in this context. I placed the technique of bricolage — the linking of objects that have been found and exhumed — ahead of the finding of form and motif. The ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss defined this process as "wild thinking", where things are torn from their context and change their meaning in the process. My vision for developing the Venus was inspired by New Burlesque dancers and the paintings and objects of the Surrealists: an association with the subjects of the body, sensuality, memory and discovery. The six-sided room — an empty white interior — opens up the view into the dancers' abstract universe, where they bear such fantastically cheeky names as Dirty Martini, Gypsy Rose Lee, Lady Zorro, Kitten on the Keys, Mimi Le Meaux… These women from the world of Burlesque dance a life-affirming version of the striptease that never goes so far as to reach nudity — a dance that shows the emancipation of the female body with a great deal of humour and glamour, and it is also infectious. Beauty, the attribute ascribed to Venus is the product of self-confident role play.
(Ursula Hübner)