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May 3, 2019 – Review
Ericka Beckman and Marianna Simnett
Daisy Hildyard
Marianna Simnett’s videos, currently on show at FACT Liverpool, are played on a continuous loop, so you can’t tell how they begin. The same blonde girl is sent on hallucinatory adventures in The Udder (2014) and Blood (2015): inside a cow’s udder, around an Albanian mountain, through agricultural machinery, and up her own nose. The narratives are, in both senses, loopy, and the videos are screened in a square room on adjacent walls: while you watch one, the visuals of the other flicker in the corner of your eye. The effect is disorientating. Viewers were squirming.
Simnett’s videos are notoriously visceral. The Udder shows the dissection of a cow’s teat; Blood gives a keyhole-view of a brutal operation, and has two personified nose-bones gnawing on a septum, complete with gristly slurping sounds. But Simnett’s third work in the exhibition challenges in a different way. Faint with Light (2016) is a room with a large panel of white striplights which flash, irregularly, in correspondence with a reverberating soundtrack of the artist hyperventilating violently until she passes out. It’s physically uncomfortable in there. The show asks how far your body is willing to go, whether it’s because Blood makes you feel squeamish, …