THE BLOODY CHAMBER

Curators

Hannah Thorne

Artists

Justin Fitzpatrick

Lucia Quevedo

Nils Alix-Tabeling

“A long, a winding corridor, as if I were in the viscera of the castle; and this corridor led to a door of worm-eaten oak, low, round-topped; barred with black iron… The key slid into the new lock as easily as a hot knife into butter… If I found some traces of his heart in a file marked: Personal, perhaps, here, in his subterranean privacy, I might find a little of his soul. It was the consciousness of the possibility of such a discovery, if its possible strangeness, that kept me for a moment motionless, before, in the foolhardiness of my already subtly tainted innocence, I turned the key and the door slowly creaked back…”

Angela Carter, ‘The Bloody Chamber’

‘The Bloody Chamber’ is the title of a collection of re-imagined fairy tales by Angela Carter. The eponymous story, based on the tale of Bluebeard, has a prohibition at the centre of the narrative: the protagonist can go anywhere she wishes in her new husband’s castle, with the exception of one room. When she finally opens this door, the Bloody Chamber reveals itself in a grotesque scene of mutilated corpses and viscera. Hidden within the gilded perfection of the castle, it is a grisly remainder. ‘The Bloody Chamber‘, like much of Carter’s writing, interrogates the fluidity of sexuality, the zones of influence between humanity and animality, and the constant metaphorical potential in living bodies and the architecture and landscape that surrounds them.