The Convent of Pleasure

For this first edition, Ani Schulze presents her ongoing soap opera, The Convent of Pleasure, loosely based on Margaret Cavendish's 1668 play about a community of women who choose each other over marriage. The museum has commissioned a new episode, Schulze filmed it on site, and it focuses on the architecture of ‘the convent’. Episode 4: Harlequin’s Arrival is presented alongside two earlier installments, all newly acquired for the collection.

Schulze finds an unexpected match for that story in the museum's own collection: De Ploeg’s collective structure, and in particular the work of Alida Pott, its first female member, whose puppets and watercolours already treated identity as something fluid rather than given. As if created by time travelling, Schulze’s work spans references from four centuries, an approach that is as whimsical as it is critical.