Glass Urinary Devices
PATTY CHANG
September 14 – November 3, 2024

Guest writer: MICHELLE VAN TONGERLOO

In 2015, American artist Patty Chang followed the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, the longest aqueduct in the world, which brings water from southern to northern China. While walking, she collected her urine in discarded plastic bottles found along the way, drawing a connection between the large-scale infrastructural attempt to control the flow of water and the uncontrollable flows of her own body. Once back in Boston, Chang made a series of hand-blown glass sculptures modelled on the plastic bottles that she utilised during her journey. For Chang’s exhibition at A Tale of A Tub, a collection of these prosthetic-like sculptures will be presented on the ground floor, reflecting on the flow of water that once passed through the former washhouse alongside Chang’s own ruminations on water as a metaphorical point of departure for geopolitics, human excess and waste.

The question of public sanitation sits very much on the surface of many Dutch cities—highly visible on the one hand, and eternally lacking on the other. Depending of course, on where you sit on the gender scale. As an example of this, at the end of the nineteenth century, the first ‘pee curl’ was installed by the Public Works Department of Amsterdam—a spiral-shaped steel urinal structure designed for men to pee in private in public, many of which are still standing today. A couple of decades later in 1928, the nation’s capital established its first urinary committee titled ‘Committee of Consultation on the Urinal Question in Amsterdam’. Yet despite this civic investment in managing sanitation health, the male-to-female ratio of public toilets has been historically skewed, with claims that women’s toilets involved higher costs and that public toilets were intended for ‘the man who works in the street’ being waged in the face of complaints. Off the back of this, in 1969 the Dutch feminist group Dolle Mina campaigned for women’s ‘pee rights’, a ‘potty parity’ push that has continued right up until this day—brought to even more public attention in the last ten years when, in 2015, Geerte Piening urinated in the street and refused to pay the fine in protest, a refusal that saw her go to court and the issue enter mainstream attention. Just this year, in response to public lobbying, €4 million has been pledged to installing wheelchair and gender accessible public toilets throughout major cities. Yet still now, it’s hard to walk down the centre of Rotterdam on a busy weekend without only encountering a portable urinal installed for man’s convenience.

The body and its confrontation with the realities of access has long underpinned the work of Patty Chang. Most known for her video and photographic work from the mid 1990s, through which she focused on the performing female body, her more recent works unpack the geographical and environmental realities of locations of political, cultural and personal significance. While a notable turn, bodily fluids continue to flow through her work, from urine to breast milk to tears. Here, Chang’s glass urinary devices almost act as a hinge between her early feminist expressions and her later mediations on landscape—given their awareness of the gendered body and the limits to access it rubs up against within the public realm. Within the context of the Netherlands and the aforementioned history of public sanitation, Chang’s series of sculptures, not coincidentally made from translucent glass, push at the visibility of our daily encounters with problems of access, both within the domains of public health and beyond.

Accompanying the exhibition is a specially commissioned text by Rotterdam street doctor and general practitioner Michelle van Tongerloo. In this text, Tongerloo reflects on the realities of women’s homelessness and sanitary care in the streets of Rotterdam. It will be published in our second bulletin—a newly established platform for a corresponding writing program, which experiments with different ways to talk about the content of our exhibitions.