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Project Overview

If childhood is a land of milk and honey, it is also a place of demons and ghosts. In Marianna Simnett’s short film The Udder, the mammary gland of the title doubles as a kind of memory machine that plugs us directly into that heightened, reverberant universe. Shot on a robot dairy farm in rural Sussex, and conjuring extraordinary performances from the people who live and work there, Simnett’s magic-realist tale considers the increasingly technical process of automated milk production as the site of an elemental struggle between the forces of purification and corruption; forces that loom equally large over a much more personal rite of passage, in which halcyon innocence is shadowed and clouded by the uncertainties of puberty. As soon as that threshold is crossed (even as soon as it is suggested), everything changes. Inside this looking-glass world, images sunder and splinter, and words take on double meanings. As the White Queen might have said: the udder is utterly udder, and utterly other – liable to transform, in a moment, from maternal monad to grisly gonad, or shape-shift further into protuberant nose, or phallic appendage. Simultaneously a familiar source of comfort and a disconcerting harbinger of the desires of the flesh, the udder is heavy with symbolism. Proceeding placidly to the place where it is milked, mutely acquiescing to the apparatus that surrounds it, it also invokes our bodies’ relationship to ever-enveloping technology, and the looking-glass landscape it portends: a new land of milk and honey, perhaps, but just as likely a new place of demons and ghosts.

Project details

The Udder

ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art), Melbourne

9 December 2023 - 3 March 2024

The Udder (2016)

mariannasimnett.com

8 May 2020 - 22 May 2020

The Udder

Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin  

13 April 2019 - 28 July 2019

Blood and The Udder

FACT, Liverpool

29 March 2019 - 16 June 2019

The Udder

Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong

16 February 2019 - 28 April 2019

Blood In My Milk

MMK, Frankfurt

27 October 2018 - 6 January 2019

Blood In My Milk

New Museum, New York

4 September 2018 - 6 January 2019

The Udder and Blood

Zabludowicz Collection, London

22 March 2018 - 8 July 2018

Jerwood/Film and Video Umbrella Awards: What Will They See of Me

CCA, Glasgow International

4 April 2014 - 21 April 2014

Jerwood/Film and Video Umbrella Awards: What Will They See of Me

Jerwood Space, London

12 March 2014 - 27 April 2014

The Udder at Toxic Womanhood

FACT, Liverpool

29 June 2016 - 2 December 2024

The Udder

Vdrome.org

1 June 2018 - 14 June 2018

More information

Commissioned for the Jerwood/Film and Video Umbrella Awards: What Will They See of Me? A collaboration between Jerwood Arts and FVU. In association with Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow and University of East London, School of Arts and Digital Industries. FVU is supported by Arts Council England.

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Media

Blood and The Udder, Install at FACT Liverpool
Image Gallery

Blood and The Udder, Install at FACT Liverpool

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Press

The Guardian | Hannah Clugstone | No fairytale endings for these radicals

4 April 2019
Link to article

Nombre | Judit Bailón | 'Interview with Marianna Simnett'

16 March 2015
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Aesthetica | 'Interview with Jerwood/FVU Award Winner, Marianna Simnett'

13 March 2015
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AQNB | Giulia Smith | 'Marianna Simnett talks about her films'

20 August 2015
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