Performance installation in which my hair was connected to the ceiling, and gallery visitors were permitted to cut it off and shave my head with clippers and then a razor until I was bald. An inverted forest of roughly twenty five locks hangs from the ceiling. Combined with the shorn remains, this constitutes a site of gendered expectation excised.
(performance installation, 8hrs)
Exhibition history:
2001 – Art Institute of Chicago/ Gallery 2
2009 – Jewish Museum of New York (sculpture and video) Winner of first ever Audience Award.
2010 – Jewish Museum of San Francisco
Publication history:
Reinventing Ritual – Contemporary Art and Design for Jewish Life. Daniel Belasco, ed.; with contributions by Arnold M. Eisen, Julie Lasky, Danya Ruttenberg, and Tamar Rubin. Yale.
“In the Mosaic: Jewish Identities in Canadian Performance and Installation Art”
by Carol Zemel. Canadian Theatre Review, Winter 2013, no. 153, pp. 13-19
“Hadassah and Halacha: the Interventions of Queer Jewish Performance Art” by Carol Zemel in Jews and Theatre in an International Context. Edna Nashon, ed. 2012. Brill.
Balancing on the Mechitza: Transgender in Jewish Community, Noach Dzmura (ed.), North Atlantic, 2010.
GLQ7.4, Carolyn Dinshaw, David Halperin eds. Duke University Press.