Printed Matter

Thank you. I prefer lions.
Christina Werner

‪The book Thank you. I prefer lions. completes Christina Werner’s multi-part work »A Lion Tamer Story«, which also includes video and installation components. In the course of research for the video installation from the year 2018 and respectively 2021, the artist collected biographies, historical photographs and other images of the exceptional women who worked in circuses training lions and other animals from around 1860 to 1980. ‬

Publication Thank you. I prefer lions.
Artists Christina Werner
Publisher Self-published
Pages 96 pages
Available here

‪Christina Werner does more than simply present a collection of images of female lion trainers. In the way she orders, groups and rearranges them she calls for a new reading both of the images and of the people appearing in them. She uses collage to change the prevailing narrative, providing a new perspective on these women and emphasising shared attributes of their styles of representation, poses and gestures.

The use of collage bestows new meaning on what might otherwise be taken for merely historical photographs and illustrations. The artist’s new compilation of these images is structured neither chronologically nor by individual biography. Instead the sequence is determined by bodily postures and the protagonists’ styles of self-presentation. Some postures and gestures scarcely changed in the course of almost a hundred years: they circulated across all media because what proved to be successful once was deliberately repeated and commercialised.‬

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