New findings in Vogue magazine

Valérie Belin

Sanja Iveković

Seen this summer in Paris, elles@centrepompidou.
"Diary, 1976"

Another, very 70's feminist work :

Double life, 1975

"Dvostruki zivot (Double life, 1975) is a series of 66 pairs of photographs where snapshots from her personal album are placed side by side with images of women from women's magazines, paired according to the similarity in their appearances, figures, accessories and situations. The emphasis on the parallelism between the mass media and the private photographs blurs the distinction between original and copy, between model and representation, and invites us to think about the nature and origin of the stereotypes of femininity. Is it the mass media that appropriate expressions, poses and attitudes which are typical of female behaviour or is it women who, under the influence of those media constructs, have ended up adopting them? Ivekovic suggests the influence of the mass media in the shaping of feminine stereotypes and turns them into elements of identity. "

More recent work (Gen XX, 1997-2001) :

"Sanja Iveković's project Gen XX has been realised as advertisements published in various magazines. The women in the photographs are professional models whose faces are familiar to the contemporary audience, while the text accompanying the photos presents National Heroines known to the generations that lived in socialist ex-Yugoslavia, but have been completely erased from the contemporary collective consciousness. The manoeuvre that Sanja Iveković performs within the Gen XX media action consists of appropriating the media talk and subverting it by its own means. Using the media is always a manipulation, a technical treatment of the given material with a particular goal in mind. When the technical intervention is of immediate social relevance, manipulation is a political act (which it is by default within the media industry). Gen XX turns this commonly accepted fact into its advantage, appealing to people's sophistication, addressing a 'target group' that takes pleasure in being taken seriously and should not be left to advertising.(2) Gen XX gives lessons in both history and media dwelling in the imaginary space that shapes the formation of the public. Its subversive tactics do not reside in the practice of provocation but in its accommodation to the social codes and conventions of everyday life informed by mass culture.It is a certain translation from a specialised language into the media code, re-translated by media recipients into their own language of the every-day. The effectiveness of its communication strategy consists of this translation based on the analysis of the moment of performance and transmission of knowledge in relation to the moment of the conception and of the research itself."

http://www.ljudmila.org/scca/platforma3/ilic_krstic.htm

Trials

Barbara Probst

Click here to see more + read interview : http://celinesianidjiakoua.blogspot.com/2009/06/barbara-probst-work-and-interview.html

Mehraneh Atashi - "Bodiless, I"

Mehraneh Atashi's amazing "self-portraits"... I just love them ... ever so inspiring ...


Mehraneh Atashi's Statement :

"The breath of women is religiously prohobited in the Zourkhaneh.Zourkhaneh, a traditional centre of male sport where religion ,tradition,virility and symbol of the persian hero are all mixed.The first day I entered the zourkhaneh with mirrors reflecting the sence all over,I suddenly found myself standing in front of some big and strong men .It was so hard to gain the trust of these extremly religious moslems and their agreement to pose half naked in front of me and the mirror, but magic of photography helped me ,I made sure to be peresent in each photos as a subject among the heroes. "
http://www.mehranehatashi.com/tabid/57/Default.aspx

Tracey Emin's erotic/non erotic drawings

Tracy Emin talking about a series of drawings she made:

"I enjoyed making this series because I somehow felt removed from it. And even though it is an erotic subject, I even felt distant from the sexuality of the pictures. It was almost like I was trying to get to the bottom of something, understand something - what it means to be a woman, a single entity and feminine. There is no shock or offence intended. They were made for me, trying to deal with something that is going on in my mind. And that's the beautiful thing about drawing: it's intimate, like handwriting, and the dialogue is between the paper and me."

The ambiguity here is all in the fact that she actually "exhibits" those drawings. The subject being erotic, even though her intentions were not, by being seen by others, they become "officially" erotic.

I am very much interested in this moment when the author/artist still has the control over showing or not showing, letting the work be seen or not and in that way offering something erotic or not.

Whatever TE says her intentions were, she is showing her drawings.

Drawings :

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/may/25/tracey-emin-drawing-art