That is to say: while these installations, ready-mades, and sculptures carry a charge of meaning all their own, they also emerge from that same “inaugural gesture”: a blow struck against the different forms of violence experienced by the artist and by those who, like her, also live a dissident form of life. This, then, is the gesture of someone freeing herself from the bonds once imposed upon her and who is now able to take them into her own hands – like someone taking hold of the reins of her own story – and capable of turning even those bonds, those reins, into the raw material of [her] reinvention.

“Theatricality” also appears in the masks suggested in other self-portraits, as well as in the “physical” masks confined to a display case: expressionless masks that point to neither tragedy nor comedy; transparent masks that hide nothing of the wearer’s face, turning her instead into a persona in the older theatrical sense – a mask, a role, a performed character. It is again Hans Belting who argues that every portrait is a mask, just as every face – whether portrayed or real – can reveal or conceal what we think and feel. By stepping into so many different roles in these self-portraits, Thix suspends the boundary between reality and fiction, between the person and the character she performs, and plays with the very idea of “identity”: every bit as malleable as the body and the face-mask. If the self-portrait draws on her own biography, it is not in order to fix an image of herself for all time, but to express, with each new portrait, her provisional face of the moment.

In some sense, everything in this exhibition is a kind of “allegory of the self.” The allegory is always assembled from fragments charged with intense meaning. So it is with the “bedroom” itself, and with each piece of furniture inside it; so it is, throughout the space, with each of the sculptures. The “still lifes” often present miniaturized versions of self-portraits as small knickknacks in a camp aesthetic. At times, they also present small scenes whose composition carries a symbolic, emblematic weight. The image of the dead deer recurs insistently as an emblem of the one who had to die so that the woman could come into being. The deer reappears, too, in a camp aesthetic, as Bambi . In her attempt to define camp sensibility, Susan Sontag wrote that, among other things, it turned “the serious into the frivolous.” In Thix’s work, camp operates intentionally against the grain of that definition: what seems frivolous, what seems innocent, is in fact a matter of the utmost seriousness. One has to come close to see that the camp wallpaper, printed with flowers, conceals sharpened knives and razor blades among the petals. Yes: in Thix, camp is irony; camp is mockery.