Oil on canvas, mixed media on paper, video projection.

The title has a double meaning in German and English: “Loth’s Lot” (Loth’s fate/destiny) as well as “Loth('s) Slot” (Loth’s slit, slot, or opening).

This work is an engagement with the “Holy Scripture,” specifically a passage from the Old Testament (Genesis 19:1-29 and Genesis 19:30-38).

Lot lives with his wife and daughters in the sinful city of Sodom. God has heard that violence and perversion reign there and sends two angels to scout the city and search for “righteous” people who should be spared from its destruction. Lot takes the two strangers into his home. A mob of Sodomites then comes to his door and demands that the young men be handed over “so that we may have sex with them.” In their place, Lot offers his virgin daughters: “Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man. Let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please” (Genesis 19:8). God rewards this „good deed“ by enabling Lot and his family to flee. When his wife, against the angels’ warning, turns back and looks  at the destruction of the city, she is turned into a pillar of salt as punishment. Lot flees with his daughters to Zoar and later into the mountains, where they live in a cave. There, the two daughters get their father drunk and seduce him. Thus, Lot becomes both father and grandfather to the two sons born from this union—Moab and Ben-Ammi—from whom the Moabite and Ammonite peoples descend.

The story of Lot and his daughters has been a very popular subject in art history because it allowed artists to treat a sexual theme, making these works popular pictures for gentleman’s rooms. The most common depiction is the part of the story in which the daughters seduce their father. In the larger paper work in the background, there are therefore excerpts from art-historical works: the many faces of the seduced Lot. In this story, the daughters have no names of their own and are defined only through their father and sons. In my work, I aim to question the course of the story by extremely depicting what these daughters are actually supposed to have done. First, the virgin daughters are to be delivered to a horny mob, and then these—presumably traumatized—daughters are supposed to have pounced on their helpless father. Sexual abuse has always been conveniently portrayed as seduction on the part of the victims, thereby turning the perpetrators into unwilling, helpless figures and thus absolving them. This act of incest is further sanctioned in the Bible by the fact that the sons of the daughters form two important origins of tribes.

Furthermore, the Bible usually describes only two types of women: the holy ones who completely renounce sex, or the lustful ones who seduce unsuspecting men—neither can live out their own self-determined sexuality, since even the seductresses can only hope for men’s favor.

It was time for a new kind of image—one that is not welcome in gentleman’s rooms.