“SEXUALITY IS THE CENTRAL KEY TO WOMENS' FREEDOM.

MALE OWNERSHIP OF WOMENS' SEXUALITY IS WHAT MAKES PATRIARCHY POSSIBLE” Shere Hite

REQUIEM for SHERE HITE , Photo and video installation at GB gallery NYC , 2023

The exhibition at GB Gallery NYC coincided with the premiere of the NBC film "The Disappearance of Shere Hite" and showcased some unseen photographic works that Iris and Shere Hite had collaborated on.
Most of the works were analog, comprising unique chromogenic vintage prints, presenting Shere Hite as a modern icon, intimately connected with her femininity, intelligence, and sexuality.

Shere Hite’s 1976 bestselling book, The Hite Report, liberated the female orgasm by revealing the most private experiences of thousands of anonymous survey respondents. Her findings rocked the American establishment and presaged current conversations about gender, sexuality, and bodily autonomy.

- Requiem For Shere Hite

The dialogue could not have been more fitting, nor more beautiful: Feminist and scientist Shere Hite meets artist Iris Brosch in Paris in 1991. Paris was the place of encounter for two special personalities of the 21st century. The city opened wide its doors and its inspiring possibilities for Shere Hite and Iris Brosch. No place in the world seemed more suited to reflect on the philosophy of femininity while exploring developments and risks of the women's movement in the 21st century. The experiences of the foreign, the shrill profusion of a city like Paris, its sometimes contradictory multiformity or the encounters with completely different ways of life are lasting impressions that, as broadening of horizons, have shaped the development and the work of Shere Hite and Iris Brosch.

At that time, Shere Hite was at the peak of her career. Beyond the usual boundaries between feminism, science and the public. She explored, interpreted and sold the great subject of female sexuality in a new way like no other. For this she was highly respectedby her readers and hounded by the press. With her Hite Report, which sold some 50 million copies, Hite pioneered feminist sexual research.

In her Paris period, which marked the end of her flight from America, she focused primarily on family structures and their impact on women's sexuality. Her own childhood was the starting point of her research. The fundamental disappointment of the reception of her works in America led her to accept German citizenship a few years later.

Iris Brosch is a young internationally sought-after photographer in the nineties. She is interested in the character of personalities and approaches her photographs close to the model, focusing especially on a face, a body or a small scene. The deliberately provocative-realistic depictions of sexuality are part of her plan to unmask a misperceived value system and replace it with a poetic feminism. Her photographs are works of art that bring the female body into our field of vision and uniquely tell of longing and anger, but also of perception and repression. Together, Shere Hite and Iris Brosch have explored the female body in various installations, photographs and stagings. In the 21st century, the taboos of the female body are still a social phenomenon that is culturally anchored. Women are supposed to be sexually available and at the same time perfect mothers without aging. Motherhood and female pleasure are neatly separated, however, and childbearing and dying are predominantly tabooed. The symbolic summit of this view in the Christian West is the figure of Mary as a virgin mother. In several large photo series, Iris Brosch and Shere Hite address the aspects of fertility, sexuality, and death as parts of the life cycle. In doing so, they stage everyday situations and dramas. These oscillate between a secluded existence in wholesome, nostalgic bourgeoisie and exhibitionistic, lascivious display. The scenes depicted are interspersed with quotations from Christian art, whose stylistics are reinterpreted for the picture's own story.

Manon BURSIAN

Opening of “Requiem for Shere Hite” GB Gallery , NYC