Let Me Draw You a Bath

The bathtub as a stage for all kinds of actions—artist Bianca Kennedy presents the bathtub in four work series and presents existential themes such as birth, sexuality and death. Personal hygiene becomes a secondary matter here.

Isn’t the bathtub an auspicious symbol? For the offline mode of life? For leisure time and hygiene? But anyone who associates the bathtub only with naked bodies and relaxation should take a deeper look at Let me draw you a bath. In her monograph, the artist Bianca Kennedy shows that an entire life can take place in the bathtub. It’s where people read, write, drink, smoke pot, kiss, laugh, sing, cry, mourn, argue, sleep, shoot, kill and love.

Kennedy has been exploring the bathtub in various video works and drawings since 2016. She has created a silent film, a series of 200 drawings with digitally augmented con- tent, a 3-channel video installation, and a Virtual Reality experience. Bianca Kennedy uses the bathtub as a culturally and art-historically charged symbol to explore the boundaries between cinema and video art and to question visual traditions.

Each work complex is preceded by an interview excerpt conducted by the artist together with art historian Darja Zub. General insights into bathing are provided by Anna Mayr’s essay Zurück in die Wanne (Back to the Bathtub), published in ZEIT Magazin in 2019, and the poem In the Bath by Jo Shapcott with a German translation by poet Jan Wagner. The book is supplemented with texts by Philipp Bollmann (curator, Wemhöner Collection) and Dr Thomas Girst (art historian and cultural manager).