Celebration
photography
2013-2014
The project Celebration works with the concept of a male gaze and canons of a normative corporality within patriarchal culture and contemporary media as its part, problematizing the process and conditions of subjectivation and self-representation, including these elements into the space of contemporary Belarusian culture.
Feminist critique claims that in the patriarchal discourse a woman is above all a passive object of gaze, she should feel pleasure being looked at and admired. This photo project on one hand presents a hypertrophied gaze, radically intent scrutinizing, where woman as an image crumbles into the indistinct spot, texture. The more intent the gaze, trying to appropriate the image, the more the image resists recognition and definition. On the other hand it reproduces the conventions of gender representation, particularly in the media, by the women trough the postures they take, exposing oneself to the imaginary “male gaze”.
The project deals with the dialectics of production the body – the one initiated by the subject and the one imposed by the subjectivational techniques of power. The method of appropriation is used in case of the pictures from social networks – fragments of young bodies from the Minsk discotheques. These beautiful posing bodies captured from the crowd seem anonymous as they are deprived of the personal and social history; they communicate only youth, beauty and sublime. Another set of images are photographs of the city sculptures. Long-lived and hardly monumental, bronze bodies of the contemporary urban sculpture are explicitly naturalistic and almost pornographic, responding to the request of the power and embodying corporality within a specific canon.
Immobility, temporal suspension and assignation for scrutinising as well as exclusion of social characteristics of these posing bodies and lack of historicity of the sculpture incorporates them into the context of the official Belarusian culture with its aspiration towards the decorative and claim for non-political character of the latter.
