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A Room of One’s Own is an essay published in 1929 by the English writer Virginia Woolf. Considered a classic of the women’s movement, Woolf’s essay explores the social and material conditions necessary for women to create literature. Within the context of the early 20th century, Woolf argues that women need both financial independence and a room of their own to fully develop their creative potential. This ‘room’ becomes a metaphor for private property, material and intellectual independence, personal privacy, the right to cultural production, and a distinct discursive space in the writing of history.

In her solo exhibition, a room of my own, at Mehdi Chouakri Berlin, Hannah Sophie Dunkelberg takes up Woolf’s literary form of social critique; she transfers the writer’s plea to reevaluate the connections between gender, autonomy, and art into her own sculptural discourse. The exhibition opens with Dunkelberg’s own interpretation of the drawing mentioned in the quote, which Woolf’s fictional writer creates impulsively—out of an affective response of anger—of Professor von X, a figure easily read as an analytical objectification of the institution of patriarchy. Stored in a pink heart-shaped cabinet and translated into the drawing process the artist has developed, where a delicate hand drawing is gradually abstracted and subjected to a mechanical process, a dialogue unfolds not only about female-associated artistic practices, techniques, and media but also the nuanced attribution of meaning and stereotyping of male and female anger—and more generally, emotionality.

 Guided by Dunkelberg’s own spectrum of affects—including, presumably, anger—the subsequent works in the exhibition can also be understood as a kind of impulse collage. In a poetic and flirtatiously affirming manner, with an approach similar to Woolf’s, she connects artistic fiction, personal experiences, and memories—both individual and collective—as well as (gender) clichés and symbolisms with contemplations specific to art and media. The result is a space of reference that is both symbolically and biographically charged, drawing on motifs such as hearts, teddy bears, bows, flowers, and (Christmas) baubles, and pointing beyond their inherent—alleged—cuteness and decorativeness. 

While Woolf developed the intellectualised form of anger as a method of expression, using the figure of ‘the madwoman’ to reclaim patriarchal labels of the hysterical, crazy, and angry woman—the monster, the evil stepmother, the witch, and Medusa—Dunkelberg’s resistance lies in playing with contradictory attributions. Her madness, her anger, and her discord are reflected in the equally self-determined appropriation of the naivety, vulnerability, and sensitivity also attributed to women—in other words, the stylised weakening of the female subject. Hannah Sophie Dunkelberg’s perspective deliberately distances itself from generalities. Instead, she uses her subjective horizon of experience—her room of my own—to develop a personal and constructive approach that transforms proclaimed weaknesses into self-confidence and a distinct visionary language that challenges conventional attitudes. Powerful cuteness!

– Katerine Niedinger translated from Hendrike Nagel

Photos © Andrea Rossetti