Thrust Projects is proud to present the debut New York exhibition Katrina Daschner “Fear Eat Soul Up”, a complete installative collage of sewn objects, drawings, private found footage, personal photographs and video material that interweave images of women in different roles with specific queer desires. Katrina Daschner, a performance artist using video and photography, acts out her projects within the queer context. Exploring the relationship between nature and gender in her own and projected experiences

Daschner’s exhibition draws from various countries and times. The title “Fear Eat Soul Up” (“Angst essen Seele auf”) refers to the literal translation of Fassbinder’s 1974 film and to the title of a work in the show, a photograph of the sentence tattooed into the artist’s arm. Nature, nature I’m your bride, take me as I am (sewn collage, stirrups, horse whip, tie) draws inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, a narrative about a character who struggles to find a sense of identity especially in terms of sex and gender over the course of several centuries. What emerges from Daschner’s findings about the “nature” of identity is that it is not an issue of one’s biological sex, but of one’s own particular social context and desire of gender seen as something that can be fluid. Another “collage”, Harbor of Love is a map with crochet sewn-forms on canvas; the forms do not correspond to a known State or continent but rather provoke an illusion of fictive territories to be understood in a social context. It represents a platform for projections in a world beyond heteronormative structures of relationships. Daschner projects a video Naima and Naima, of a belly dancer and a female sailor intensely flirting, a loop made from a clip of a 1940’s Egyptian film staring the famous actress Naima Akef playing the two roles.