Lorelei

The original song of the « Lorelei » dates from 1837 when Heinrich Heine’s lyrics were set to music by Friedrich Silcher, a song that became well known in German-speaking lands. During the Nazi regime and World War II, in the effort to dismiss any Jewish contribution to German art, Heine was discredited as the author of the lyrics.
Hansen’s ‘Lorelei’ is a doubled water landscape image cut from a single cow hide. A positive and negative space – two realities apparently contradicting each other and oscillating between meaning and the absurd. Like scientific samples the leather pieces are held on the wall with pins.
« Monstrously mythological, from these fullnesses and voids, from this endangerment and ruin of the ideal of Art, new topographies emerge, which in turn become matrices for new possibilities. If they stabilise on equine skins, they will give birth to monsters. This will be the fatal attraction of the song ‘Lorelei’ (2013), an assemblage organised to echo these tensions, contracting and stretching like a lung. » — Sophie Boursat, 2025.