ins Gras beissen
(2001)

Kunstkredit exhibition Basel-Stadt, Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz 2001 / Christmas exhibition, Kunsthalle Bern (ill.) / Regionale 01, [plug.in], Basel; come back, pool position #3, Projektraum exex, St. Gallen 2003; Was ist das Leben bloss?, video project AWO Thüringen, Kassel 2007

"Biting the dust" is a symbolic expression for dying and is most likely derived from the behavior of wounded soldiers who bit the ground on the battlefield to suppress their pain, which has been recorded in written sources since antiquity. In the installation, Pascale Grau deals with this expression on a performative, (physical) linguistic level: she kneels on the grass, bends her head forward in eruptive movements, almost as if in a trance, and plucks out a few tufts of red clover with her mouth, which she then chews up. She translates the recordings of the video performance into an audiovisual formation that clearly exhibits traits of "musical phrasing". The endless succession of the larger-than-life projected image sequence, which lasts only a few seconds, creates an almost meditative rhythm, which is intensified by the sound - loud, exaggerated and also metrically structured grinding or chewing noises. Grau formulates a direct visual equivalent to the title-giving figure of speech, whose semantic potential she dissolves, as it were, in the performative act. With lustful determination, she gives herself over to grazing, chewing up the usual contexts of meaning, as it were. Each "ingestion" seems to produce new associations in which language and image, linguistic and cultural references overlap. (Irene Müller 2009)