Beate Passow is a pugnacious person. At least that’s what she says. “That has to be visible in my work.” Which is why the Munich photo and collage artist doesn’t paint still lifes with flowers, “although I like them”. Instead, she almost feels compelled to expose questionable power structures in her works, which are staged with a great deal of wit. She also does this in her most recent work: “Fight Club”, a nine-part tapestry series, which can be seen in the uppermost atrium gallery of the Freising Diocesan Museum. A pointed, aesthetic comment not only on women’s struggle for equality, but also on the role that religion and church play in it.
The positive aspects of the latter first: The nuns in the Beuerberg monastery paid attention to the physical education of the girls entrusted to them. Passow found historical photos there and quickly placed them on the jerseys of the soccer players Alexandra Popp and Wendie Renhard, who jumped up in a header duel. “We wouldn’t have gotten this far in women’s sports without the nuns’ gymnastics,” she quips.
Her tapestries are based on collages that she puts together on the computer from photos – “all paid for”. They are woven in the Augsburg Textile and Industrial Museum. Passow raves about the excellent cooperation with the weaving mill there, which perfectly implements her collages, which often have an infinite number of gray tones, naturally also only on the computer. The advantage of the tapestries: “I can roll them up and wear them myself,” says the 78-year-old artist.
Beate Passow sees herself as a quarrelsome person.
(Photo: Marco Einfeldt)
The starting point for “Fight Club”: “Finding an answer to the question of when and why women left their comfort zone to take to the streets.” The series begins at the beginning of the 20th century with the controversy surrounding women’s suffrage. No aggressive gesture can be found. On the contrary, Anita Augspurg and her mistresses look coquettishly at the camera with their pencils casually resting on their chins. The black women representatives of the American civil rights movement, with their “Register” placards placed by Passow in opposite rows, smile softly. There is no trace of the bloody struggles that raged in the southern states in 1965 for the right to vote.
In the work “The Right to Vote”, Anita Augspurg and her fellow campaigners look coquettishly at the viewer.
(Photo: Marco Einfeldt)
Passow also puts up a memorial for murdered journalists with dead screens as grave markers, lets an oversized crocodile head snap at the half-naked bodies of the demonstrating Femen women, or reminds of paragraph 218 with a white christening gown in a moorland landscape. At some point she had the feeling that women were “closed”. sacred” (Passow). But since the latter can also be violent, she brought a crouching Peshmerga soldier from Iraq who is fighting IS into the series. Of course, the real threat lurks behind her: a billboard with the dress code of the terrorist organization IS, which robs women of any self-determination.
In her work “Klösterliche Physical Exercises,” Passow mounted photos of Beuerberg convent students on the bodies of soccer players Alexandra Popp and Wendie Renhard.
(Photo: Marco Einfeldt)
Passow’s pictorial worlds are mostly black and white. She makes an exception for “#Metoo” when she puts pink “brain hats” on the male and female models. Color also for “Maria 2.0”: In the middle of the opening service of the Amazon synod of the Catholic Church – “The clergy stand at attention like in the military” – she mounted the opening demonstration of the women’s initiative Maria 2.0 in Fulda in the shape of a cross. Laughing women wearing pink balloon crosses. “Pleasantly disordered,” says Passow. “I put it where you want it to be: in the middle.” Although – Passow shakes his head disapprovingly – in her opinion, the Maria 2.0 women are still much too tame. “They would have to refuse to do anything else for the church.”
“Fight Club” is not the first series in which Passow deals with women. Her cycle “Lotuslillies” (2000) is famous, in which she portrayed women who had been crippled by the constriction of their feet. In 1999 she had discovered small, strange shoes with high heels in a store in Los Angeles. She learned from the seller that the shoes came from China and that women with “lotus feet” still lived there. “I knew I had to go there.”
On the “#Metoo” tapestry, the artist put pink “brain hats” on male and female models.
(Photo: Marco Einfeldt)
She made it her job early on to capture wounds before they disappear. First on buildings when, together with Andreas von Weizsäcker (1956-2008), she documented and made visible traces of war in European countries (“Wounds of Memory”), later in the magnificent cycle “Counter = Denominator” (1995/97), in she photographed the forearms of Auschwitz survivors with concentration camp numbers tattooed on them.
Passow’s artistic career began comparatively late. She was still studying at the Munich Academy when she married, had a child and painted “little pictures”. When the son was 18, she left the family. “Then I got started,” she says, talking about her first “real” work: a raised hide with a gilded pulpit, coined for the hunter Franz Josef Strauss, but ultimately an argument with her father, a National Socialist chief forester who was deployed in Kraków. “The Nazi father was an incriminating challenge,” says Passow. She inherited her fighting spirit from her Polish mother, who ended up in a small town in Lower Saxony in 1945, the year the artist was born. Her father was a prisoner and she had to fend for herself with two small daughters. “I probably got it from her that you can get something going against all odds.”
Her confrontation with National Socialism shaped her art for years. “But when I came back from Israel after my scholarship, I knew I was done with this strand,” Passow recalls. The time was ripe to turn to other wounds. She traveled to China and found it liberating. “I felt like the world was open to me.” For years she traveled a lot, photographing the first prostitutes in Lhasa, mentally handicapped Chuas in Pakistan or women with veils and burqas in Iran.
In the middle of the opening service of the Amazon Synod of the Catholic Church, the artist mounted the opening demonstration of the women’s initiative Maria 2.0 in Fulda in the shape of a cross.
(Photo: Marco Einfeldt)
Recently she has been dealing with Europe a lot. She has not yet finished her work on the multi-part cycle “Monkey Business”, in which she questions the political movements of contemporary Europe. Austria is still missing, says Passow. “Klimt, Falco, Strache – I can think of too much, it’s not good for the picture.”
Passow has received a number of awards for her art, including the Gabriele Münter Prize in 2016 for her consistent artistic approach throughout her oeuvre. But their works are not easy to sell. She doesn’t want to complain. However: “As a man, I would certainly be represented in larger houses.”
Beate Passow: Fight Club, until September 10th, Freising Diocesan Museum