Overgaden

Maja Malou Lyse’s artistic practice interlaces sex education, feminist theory, and pornographic material with mass media and her own bodily posture.

For her exhibition at O—Overgaden, Lyse chases the story of one of the most iconic female images in media history and its economic trajectories: Marilyn Monroe’s undressed Playboy centerfold, crowning the magazine’s first ever issue in 1953. Lyse’s investigation sets off from the fact that the Playboy Incorporation’s founding father, Hugh Hefner, used Monroe’s image without her consent, thus building a hugely influential sex empire on stripping the female subject of autonomy—potentially the first ever example of revenge porn flooding mainstream media.

Performative in nature, the exhibition MM—the acronym of both Marilyn Monroe and Maja Malou—mixes video, memorabilia, and ready-mades, notably Hefner’s privately owned original of the Monroe nude: a gold-framed photograph that the magazine magnate signed on its front and kept in his home, the Playboy Mansion, up until his death in 2017.

Two videos follow the artist herself. One documents Lyse’s pursuit as she journeys to an auction in Hollywood to acquire the Monroe nude; the other shows the artist getting her Playboy bunny butt tattoo erased. Lyse thus traces how Monroe and Hefner are still stamping our bodies, lives, and minds as significant cornerstones of collective Western sexual consciousness. Employing Monroe’s infamous nude and the soundtrack from its auction—as a complex contemporary symbol of how identities are continuously constructed, circulated, and sexualized—MM poses questions of living currency and late capitalism, representation and domination, branding and spectacle, and simply: who owns an image?