The concept of the installation/performance came from cooperation between Amareya Theatre from Gdansk and the graphic designer/painter/writer – Beata Sosnowska with the music by Joanna Duda. All of the artists engaged in the project are well established in the Polish and international contemporary art scene and they represent a strong critical approach that undermines stereotypes, explores problematic of body and gender and supports the struggle for visibility of non-normative ways of thinking, feeling, creating.
The installation explores female corporeality – especially nudity and and vaginas, which will be multiplied and copied by many different media. Thanks to the drawings of Sosnowska, vaginas become a part of the woman’s backbone, specific tatoos, inscriptions which inspire a new language of the body. The project is far from the aesthetic approach, it wants to explore the alive, changeable and trembling aesthetics of female performance. Its goal is to criticize the process of „vaginalisation the woman” which is present in pornography and in media. The installation/performance was strongly inspired by the writings of Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous. The multiplication of images of bodies and vaginas aims at creating a situation in which the spectator will be confronted with numerous images and will look at them in a different way than before – without fear, prejudice and erotic connotations which usually objectify women. On the one hand, the vagina is just one of the parts of a woman’s body, but on the other hand it is a place of transition – mother’s vagina is our door to the physical world.
… is an attempt to de-mythologize and take off the taboo from the female body and at the same time a process of rediscovering the body beyond the borders of gender.
… is a process of blurring the borders between bodies and their fragments, between that which is outside and inside the body, it’s an act of provoking a dispersion and deconstruction of seeing to which we are used – a gaze that consumes the body for pleasure, visual cannibalism, that we practice every day more or less consciously by being immersed in culture dominated by commercials and pornography.
… fragments of bodies dispersed in the space of installation/performance, conveyed and multiplied pose a serious question about the dominant paradigm of existence of two genders and a single individual body. For us the skin is no longer a borderline that divides that which is private and that which is public but it becomes a passage towards a hidden inner topography of the female body.
Concept: Amareya Theatre and Beata Sosnowska
Drawings: Beata Sosnowska
Visuals: Beata Sosnowska
Movement: Amareya Theatre
Graphic live act: Beata Sosnowska
Music: Arszyn
Duration of installation/performance: 30-45 min.
