Agatha left me. Minne di sant’agata are the name of some of the “funny pastries” that, decorated with cherries, adorn bakeries in the streets of Sicily. Named after Agatha of Catania, whether called Agathabread or Minni di virgini, they are all edible depictions of Agatha’s round breasts — breasts that were cut off with tongs because she refused marriage to preserve her “virginity.” Punished and tortured, she is today a venerated saint and patroness; her figure continues to be instrumentalized in Christian imagery.

 

Her attributes — the severed breasts on a platter — still appear in medieval paintings and on the counters of Italian pastry shops. Between consolation and grief, between suffering, escapism and self-discovery; between anger, pop and projection; between identity, gender, body and society. It brings together two artistic positions and their different coping strategies for confronting structural and sexualized violence against bodies.

​

Instalation, a poem and  costume piece with a sound installation addresses the exhibitor’s own body and its ascribed attributes. Between thoughts of a (self-chosen) mastectomy and a brutal bodily mutilation, the severed breast becomes the focal point of the exhibition. Plaster breasts, stacked and piled in the rooms and shown on a platter by the artists in videos, reference Agatha of Catania and her severed breasts, which are now ritualized as pastries.

The work contemplates images of female breasts, their social uses, and the loss of Agatha as both patron and symbol.

​

​( Presented by Dina Zaitev and Tian Jinx Rüger at BIAS / Kunstknall Dresden 2024 ) 

​

​