Hannah-Rose Fleishman

Artist Catalogue

Virtual Exhibition

Or was I pushed?

Anonymous asks the internet at 3:00 AM, “How do I get up if I fall?”

 

To fall. A word akin to the utterance ‘um’. A definition of grey areas. The ability to fall,

no choice but to fall, the misstep, the gravitational pull, the awareness of weight, the clumsiness of the body, the need to return to the upright position. The word fall appears in various forms in the English language. In many of these lie the essence of an arrival: the weighted greeting of a baby growing in a belly, the tumbling into infatuation, the slip between awake and asleep. We fall into all of these things. But where are we meant to settle? It may be that settling is not the point.

 

In 1972 Vesna Vulović, a Serbian flight attendant falls 10 000 metres from an aeroplane, pinned down by a food trolley, and survives. Here is a great fall. What now does she know about being? How does one capture what it means to be a human? A laughable question. A question too big to be interesting. Clumsy in its futility. My work is all about a clumsy fall. A clumsy fall into the question of being.

 

Or was I pushed? subsists in the human desire to be human. In the belly-aching pain of being. In the silliness of asking questions to the internet void to try and crack the code. Questions we all ask. Uncertainties of how to be. How do I walk, kiss, fall in a way that seems as if I have needed no help? The computer professes not to fall – but does it not? Does it not fall with us as it learns from our hands to write poems? Before you breathes a human/machine collaboration, UN-pickling the absurdity of existing in the digital age, presenting the computer as, perhaps, a companion.

 

Google breaks down the steps of kissing for us:

 

1. Moisten your lips. Dry lips are no fun to kiss with or be kissed by

2. Freshen up your breath

3. Move in at an angle

4. Don’t look…

 

Sewn in between the lines of my practice is a voice searching for a missing manual. A manual we were supposed to have all received at birth. Maybe it missed me? Although I think it might have missed all of us. Or was I pushed? is a body of work that: processes the inevitable pain of the missing manual and tries to find beauty; lives in the sticky line between throat, stomach and screen; pauses in the moment of free fall and contemplates the direction of the wind.