Artworks / Simulated Tortures

Photo installation

“Even the most repressed woman has a secret life, with secret thoughts and secret feelings which are lush and wild, that is, natural. Even the most captured woman guards the place of the wildish self, for she knows intuitively that someday there will be a loophole, an aperture, a chance, and she will hightail it to escape.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés “Women Who Run with the Wolves”

The installation titled “Simulated Tortures” comprises photographs of my body in the embryonic position and several common office tools – a stapler, a pair of scissors, a punch, etc. Photo series are all self-portraits, photographed by myself: a one-man process. My works constitute elemental transfers – modifying the body as object – combining it with other stylistic elements (thread, pins etc.) to create a three-dimensional object with a large visual impact. The work you see therefore is not a photo portrait, but an installation with form and texture.

The traditional model of femininity is assumed that the primary role of women in society is a dedication to her family, which involves the abandonment of all own aspirations and personal development. Dedication to artistic creation by a woman causes her permanent remorse and suffering. Woman-artist's work becomes the act of destruction. In my installation this kind of a situation is reversed.
The act of destruction - torturing my own photographic representation, is also the act of creation. The form of the photographs has been disturbed with physical stimuli, like piercing the paper, burning or sewing it with a thread. It is not a real body, but its photographic representation that undergoes tortures in the project. However, the stimuli that act on the (photographed) body are authentic and painful, indeed. Piercing, injuring and cutting the photographs serve as a simulation for real “pain test” - a deliberate act of inflicting physical suffering. Torturing a representation of my body brings to mind voodoo rituals, mostly associated with piercing a doll, thus imposing diseases, misfortunes or death upon the victim. This installation brings to the mind a sort of a crime scene, where the spectator is a witness.
What is the purpose of inflicting such sophisticated violence upon the photographed body? What is the perpetrator of the paper crime guided by? One thing is beyond doubt – in such an organized, perfectly arranged space even crime is aesthetic and torture instruments have modern, office like character.