Super heroina
Work in progress by three artists Sanja Latinović, Jelena Jelača and Ana Janković, named Super heroine, in its first stage consists of three parts. The starting point of this work is a sculpture, made by taking body prints in plaster from different parts of body of seven women, pieced together in one body –the sculpture. This sculpture represents a basis of a research, a search for a feminine subjectivity or ways in which is possible to “enter the wild zone”, the zone in which the body exceeds the boundaries (the frame) of discursive thought. The second part of the work, in its initial presentation, thematizes the perception and the ways of conceiving separate parts of the body(face, neck, breasts, arms, legsand feet) through a video in which women whose prints were used for making a sculpture, speak of those parts of their bodies, about the way in which they and others perceive and experience that parts, ways in which they use them, and about how do they imagine the Super heroine. The third part of the work is a series of photographs of a woman in the privacy of her home, the household.
The photographs and the video verify and map, with criticism, the misogynic power of the patriarchate. However anachronistic seems the request that a woman should be a housewife at home, a lady on the street and a whore in bed, this myth continues to be revived over and over again, and both men and women equally participate in this. In the video piece this becomes visible by the way in which the women that are interviewed interject the information given from the outside about their certain parts of bodies being beautiful (and that that is relevant) and that such beautiful parts of bodies are favorable to be emphasized and used to draw attention. There is no deviation from the given socio –cultural values and they become carved into a woman’s body materializing them and putting another seal to the established social relations. And though it seems that these are the individual projects of self designation of these women, or the use of the female power, these strategies of body use tend unification, finding the universal model of beauty and an identity imposed by phallus-centrical culture and the struggle for survival in it.
In the photography we can see, so-to speak the ideal scenes of home in which a woman performs one taskafter another and fulfills her gender roll. These sights seem aestheticized, like the romanticized versions of reality, like the setting is modified for picture taking, but in fact it’s just that Super heroine is put into the interior of the household. Our heroine from the photographs is a multitasker, she cooks, feeds, nurtures, cleans, she can even do the house repairs, and all of that seemingly with ease. Above all that, she is beautiful. We can also see that the modern society expands and makes more complicated the range of tasks and requirements that woman has to bear. She is the manager of the house, support for every member of the family, she is in charge of the looks of the house, her time is everybody’s time and she leaves the status of housewife just to be a mother and a wife.
The sculptureSuper heroine it self, symbolizes the search, sets and opens the questions. It is made of several parts of different bodies, like the Frankenstein, by the author Marry Shelly and Super heroine is in search of Promethean transgression of limits. Is it possible to take layer after a layer of cultural deposits weighted on the body and liberate it from the colonizing sediment of patriarch’s? Is it possible to create a new body and how can we percieve the body out of the phallus-centrical language, if the body can not be percieved from the cultural sphere? Can we address the Super heroine at this stage of it’s representation as tabula rasa, a material base for setting a new meaning? Is she already constituted in a way that she has sex and gender, or she can be observed outside these categories?Since she was given a female gender, will in the follow-up of this work in progress authors be playing with flexibility of gender and the multitude of it forms, in a course of commitment to the idea that female subjectivity is yet to be formed and that women are the ones who should be molding it? Which kind of subversion will the authors offer, by means of Super heroine, if we agree, according to the thesis of Judith Battler, that gender comes even before sex and that gender is performative in ongoing creation and renegeneration of ourselves. The possible wild zone might be in the recontextualisation of the fluid category of gender, by seeking the places of discontinuity and/or parodying gender performatives as the Super heroine promises.
Olja Nikolić Kia
Photos of the exhibition:
