Little Murders is the second solo show in Greece of the New York based American artist Heide Fasnacht (b.1951, Ohio, USA). The artist has been working on an ongoing project that concerns the political destruction of art and culture.

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In Little Murders, a jumble of drawings, photographs, collages and installations depict the damage of archeological sites, monuments, crafts and books from all over the world. Specifically, the installation Little Murders is an image of a sculpture from the historically significant site of Hatra, in Iraq. During the Iraq War, this figure was destroyed along with many sites and artifacts that were exposed to damage and looting due to directly or indirectly Western military intervention.

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In addition, the artist exhibits a series of drawings that unveil acts of bibliocide. These images are culled from photo-documents of book burnings during “Operacion Claridad” in Argentina, manuscript burnings in Tibet by the Chinese, comic book burnings in the USA, among many others. Moreover, Fasnacht reinforces the act of violation through her collages, where she attaches 3-D vacuum shapes, similar to bomb craters, to the landscape of attacked countries, such as Afghanistan and Vietnam. 

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These cultural extinctions and distortions are poorly documented, which means they have led to a subsequent erasure from collective memory. Little Murders resurrect the history and the archive of such architectural sites and bear witness to the life of these artworks and artifacts.

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Since the artist’s first solo show at P.S. 1 in 1979, Heide Fasnacht has been a constant presence in the New York art scene. Exhibiting continuously both in the US and abroad, her works have been on view, and are in the permanent collections of, the MFA Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the Walker Art Center, and the Yale University Art Gallery. She has also been the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, a Gottlieb Foundation Grant, a Tiffany Foundation Grant and, the Publishing Residency, Lower East Side Printshop (2012). Fasnacht has most recently exhibited large-scale on-site works for Smack Mellon, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the RISD Museum.  Fasnacht received her BFA from RISD and her MA from NYU.

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