Femininity.
Photography
/ video exhibition.
You can write about
femininity at length, you can contrast it, exchange epithets, trace the history
from Venus to fashion catwalks. Men often associate it with sexuality. While
for me it is a constant change, contrasts locked in a wound-up cycle. Still, I
believe we truly feel femininity with the first movement of our baby in our
wombs, something He will never experience.
Anna Bajjou
Femininity is for me the
most fundamental common denominator which gives me the right to strive to guess
and understand my close friends and totally strange women. My impression is
that we all share something true, instinctive and timeless.
Anna Jarosz
Warmth, sensitivity, colour
and charm. A whole in tights, stilettos in mud.
- Honey, where are my socks?
- Mum, what’s for dinner today?
Good girls wear ribbons, don’t swear and don’t climb the trees.
Tomboy, Bald coot! Culottes. Trinkets, sweets and cuddlies. Squat and stand up.
It’s not appropriate! A lover and grandmother. Body and mind. Out of frame and in the frame, comfortably.
- Honey, where are my socks?
- Mum, what’s for dinner today?
Good girls wear ribbons, don’t swear and don’t climb the trees.
Tomboy, Bald coot! Culottes. Trinkets, sweets and cuddlies. Squat and stand up.
It’s not appropriate! A lover and grandmother. Body and mind. Out of frame and in the frame, comfortably.
Joanna Jasińska
Femininity is expressed
also in corporeality. A woman’s body is a structure She expresses / closes / includes
herself in and in which She is embraced. A woman’s arms make a frame creating a
space for demonstrating her state; arms of others contain her in the frame. She
accepts her corporeality affirmatively, with discomfort, at ease, with anger
and fear…
Femininity evolves
significantly speeding up in pregnancy. Physical changes in woman’s body carrying
life strongly shape her mind. Fear, acceptance, peace or contentment are never
lasting states of mind. Awareness that there is another heart beating in my
body is by all means unique with all its consequences.
Patrycja Prostak
Varnishing nails and using red lipstick, wearing
earrings, doing hair, careful applying cream and powder, putting mascara and
curling eyelashes, wearing tights or stockings, skirt, high-heel shoes or stilettos,
last look in the mirror. Next, straight posture, the walk you can manage in the
shoes, no escape. A set of attributes and character features which can refer to
femininity taken from a poor comedy. To continue, mess in handbag, inability to
drive and ability to iron; we fall into ridiculousness, patterns and clichés.
If it is a common value differentiating women from men (based on biological
sex) we search for it will be period and reproduction we will find.
Brigitte Grésy, the author of A Short Treatise against Everyday Sexism, warns against emphasis of
femininity becoming a tool creating a subordinate relation. Can it be that the
title of the exhibition of five artists being Femininity is per chance an expression of sexism that still eats
away present culture? Maybe, and can it be the result of young women’s search
of essence or maybe only playing with attributes, a love game, a challenge, a
pose, manipulation or erotic perversion?
Categories of femininity and masculinity function as
frames. A man fits into ready sets of notions, identities and behaviours.
Patrycja Prostak presents on her photographs a woman’s face squeezed in between
arms, jammed, constrained with specific gestures. Observing the frame, its dysfunctionality,
role and source allows realizing an individual set adjusted to the time of day,
mood and need of the moment. Anna Jarosz records sections of bodies and uses
them to make an educational toy. The parts can be moved in an attempt to
arrange a whole of some sort. The movement is however possible only within
restricted and prepared frame. The result happens to be unsatisfactory as the
whole is only a collection of extracts, misfitting sections, quotations from a
story about the history of corporeality and sex. The end of the game is
difficult to achieve. Still, continuous play giving insight, reflection and
change can bring satisfaction.
Works of the five women taking part in the exhibition
form another story about femininity. Undoubtedly, emphasizing the sex of the
artists they identify with is of significance since it is just the problem of
the existence of structural entireties they tackle. Talking of femininity and
making it a subject of own artistic creation is playing with fire, a danger of
repeating already familiar situation. Coining it femininity may result in ghettoization, putting on sidelines or
subordination. Yet, everyone needs to resolve their sexual categories of
identity. The artists do not create female art; the coinage based on defining
the sex of the author, is, at best, an out-of-fashion methodological approach.
The artists express their opinion about potential femininities and the process
of searching and defining them.
Joanna Jasińska’s photographs are dark and obscure;
shapes caught in the movement loom subtly. They represent some sort of activity
which remains hidden, blurred and muzzy. Is the author afraid to show
something? And it is this fear and need of delicacy that create a gloomy world
where a woman drowns in a thick chaos; you
are either too engaged or not enough engaged. Each movement is risky and
such is lack of any activity whatsoever. Jasińska encourages the viewer to
guess the captured gesture, to decipher the meaning of the form.
The authors make use of photography and video. These are
techniques that allow reproducing the picture. Possibility to make portrait
photography was connected with the ability to give birth to a child that leaves
the woman’s womb as a duplicate of its parent. From this perspective both video
and photography are techniques of artists and women who are able to duplicate
pictures. Patrycja Prostak reproduces the same shot presenting a pregnant
woman’s silhouette. She changes colour of each copy, reduces the picture to a
theme duplicated like a pop-art manner.
When giving into madness and fun you need to be careful.
Maybe game and manipulation of the femininity category is allowed and valuable
only when combined with feminist awareness?
Agnieszka Kwiecień
Agnieszka
Kwiecień is an art critic and art
historian, curator of
contemporary art exhibitions, editor
of the “Fragile” magazine.
exhibition until 29th November,
Mon-Fri, from 1100 a.m. to 5.00 p.m.
or at previous arrangement
Galeria Lamelli, Śródmiejski Ośrodek Kultury
or at previous arrangement
Galeria Lamelli, Śródmiejski Ośrodek Kultury
ul.
Mikołajska 2, 31-027 Kraków
0/12 422 19 55, ext. 19
www.galeria.lamelli.com.pl
patronage: Kurs Fotografii Artystycznej
www.kursfotoart.blogspot.com
0/12 422 19 55, ext. 19
www.galeria.lamelli.com.pl
patronage: Kurs Fotografii Artystycznej
www.kursfotoart.blogspot.com
Translation: Anna Jarosz
