Everyone’s Heart is Full of Fire

Everyone’s Heart is Full of Fire reflects on the works of Dorothy Iannone (b. 1933) and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (b. 1950), through these artists’ chronicles of love stories, each linked to a fascinating artist and character. Exploring the fusional relationship and artistic dialogue between Dorothy Iannone and Dieter Roth and the pandrogynous undertaking of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Lady Jaye, the exhibition interrogates the thin lines between love, friendship, and artistic collaboration, drawing particular attention to quotidian, personal narrations and intimate diaries.

Since the 1960s, Dorothy Iannone’s practice has been exploring ways of representing unconditional love and the female sexual experience as one of transcendence, union, and spirituality through paintings, drawings, collages, audio pieces, and artist books. The exhibition unravels a silkscreened version of an An Icelandic Saga (1967), Iannone’s drawings and texts about her love story with artist Dieter Roth, and the slideshow versions of two of her artist books, The Story of Bern or Showing Colors (1970) and Berlin Beauties (1978). Additionally, the LP record “Dear Dieter,” through which Iannone interprets songs written and recorded by herself in 1973 for Roth after their breakup, will be continuously played in the exhibition space. “Dear Dieter” in situ can be viewed here.

A cult figure in industrial music, founder of bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge has developed, as a visual artist, the Pandrogeny project— a complex series of collaborative artworks by P-Orridge and his wife and fellow musician Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge. P-Orridge and Lady Jaye sought to merge their two identities by using plastic surgery, hormone therapy, cross-dressing, and altered behavior to create the united being Breyer P-Orridge. The exhibition features works related to their wedding, such as Polaroids and collages inspired by poet Brion Gysin’s technique of “cut-ups and permutations.”

Finally, the exhibition features Marie Losier’s documentary film The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (2011), the result of a seven-year-long delicate immersion into the personal and musical universe of the couple and an absolute ode to one of the most troubling love stories of the past decades.

Dorothy Iannone (b. 1933, Boston; lives and works in Berlin) has been making artist books, paintings, drawings, sculptures, sound pieces, and video installations in relative obscurity since the 1960s until The Wrong Gallery featured her “orgasm box” in their project space at the Tate Modern in 2005; the 2006 Whitney Biennial included the original work, I Was Thinking of You, (1975/2005). Her first solo exhibition in a US museum, Dorothy Iannone: Lioness, took place in 2009 at the New Museum in New York, when she was seventy-six years old. The New York Times wrote: “High priestess, matriarch, sex goddess: the self-taught American artist Dorothy Iannone has been called all these things and more.” Her most recent solo exhibitions include Innocent and Aware at the Camden Arts Centre, London, and Imperturbable at the Centre National Édition Art Image (cneai=), Paris, both in 2013. In 2014, a solo show titled Censorship and The Irrepressible Drive Toward Love and Divinity at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich followed This Sweetness Outside of Time, a major retrospective at the Berlinische Galerie für Moderne Kunst, Berlin.

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (b. Manchester, England in 1950; lives and works in New York) was a member of the Kinetic action group Exploding Galaxy/Transmedia Exploration from 1969 to 1970. Genesis conceived of, and founded, the seminal British performance art group COUM Transmissions in 1969 and was the co-founder of Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and the spoken word/ambient music performance group Thee Majesty. P-Orridge is credited on over 200 releases, throughout which s/he has held an anti-establishment stance. In 2007, Lady Jaye Breyer passed away, and Genesis continues to practice as an inter-dimensional collaboration between the material and immaterial world. Their most recent work documents the physical alterations s/he and the late Lady Jaye endured within their Pandrogeny project, about the re-union and re-solution of male and female into a perfect hermaphroditic state. Their archives are part of the Tate Modern’s permanent collection in London.

Marie Losier (b. 1972 in Boulogne-Billancourt, France; lives and works in New York and Berlin) studied literature at the University of Nanterre (France) and Fine Arts at Hunter College in New York. The filmmaker documents unconventional portraits of heroes, personal friends, and idols of the underground, including George Kuchar, Richard Foreman, Alan Vega, and Genesis P-Orridge. Losier’s films have been shown at the Berlinale, Rotterdam Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, Tate Modern, Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), Palais de Tokyo, Centre Georges Pompidou, and the Cinémathèque Française. Her work The Ontological Cowboy (2005) was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2011, and was awarded the Caligary and the Teddy Awards. Losier received the Grand Prize at IndieLisboa, the Prix Louis Marcorelles, and the Prix des Bibliothèques at Cinéma du Réel.