Nicola Costantino: Art of Sensation

Nicola Costantino was born in Rosario, Argentina, on November 17, 1964, into a family of Italian descent. As a child, she was a little unusual, with remarkably popping eyes and many scientific and technical leanings.

While she attended the course of Fine Arts at the National University in Rosario, her interest in new artistic materials and techniques led her to research and work in craft workshops and factories. At ICI Duperial, she experimented with silicone molds and matrices on polyester resin apt for flexible polyurethane foam injection. Her skill in this technique proved decisive for the development of her art work, and enabled her to achieve the real-object perception that would become characteristic of Nicola’s art.

Costantino achieves in her art what visual arts should do: her sculptures, installations, videos, and photographs catch the eye and alter perception. Because they are predominately rooted in sensation, and not just in concepts, her artworks trigger an immediate, physical reaction. Casts of animal fetuses, molds of human skin, and soaps made with the artist’s own fat build up a tension between ornamentation and revulsion. Her innovation revolves around ethical values and the alienation from nature. Even sexuality is turned into compulsion, flesh, and transmuted bodies, turning everything into an oppressive eroticism.

In 1995, she started to experiment with an almost exact copy of human skin made in silicone that she used for the production of her clothing. And it is for theses silicon sculptures and clothes resembling erogenous parts of the human body, that she achieved notoriety. Also, she made her first coat with navels and human hair, which she herself wore during her frequent trips to New York and Los Angeles. Fashion -  a topic that had been present throughout her life along with consumption and the human body as a tool of seduction - has become a recurrent theme in her work.

Costantino frequently employs visually and conceptually shocking means to investigate corporeality, and the relationship between animals and humans. With a background in sculpture and having worked with her mother in a clothing factory as a child, Costantino constantly seeks to incorporate new materials and processes in her practice. She studied mechanical engineering to make her kinetic works, taxidermy for her casts of animal carcasses, and soap-making to create soap from her own body fat. In her later career, Costantino has turned to photography, exploring themes of doubling and manipulation.

In 2003, she started her project Savon de Corps, with soaps made with a part of her own fat obtained from a liposuction. She held a solo exhibit of her Boutique at Senda Gallery, in Barcelona’s Paseo de Gracia, a street where the world’s most glamorous clothing brands are based, and another exhibition with her whole work at Casal Solleric, Palma de Mallorca, both in Spain.
Cochon sur canapé (1992), her first solo show, was considered a forerunner of contemporary Latin American art.


In 1994, she was admitted into the Antorchas Foundation’s Barracas Workshop, coordinated by Suárez and Benedit and moved to Buenos Aires, where she settled down and started working. In 1998, she represented Argentina in the San Pablo biennial and then began to take part in several exhibits in museums around the world, such as those in Liverpool (1999), Tel Aviv (2002) and Zurich (2011). In 2000, she performed a solo show at Deitch Projects (New York); her Corset of Human Furriery became part of the MOMA collection. In 2004, she presented Animal Motion Planet, a series of orthopedic machines for stillborn animals, and Savon de Corps, a work that caused great impact in mass media.

Her reunion with Gabriel Valansi in 2006 lead her into photography, where she has more than 30 works in which she always takes the leading role embodying different characters of photography and other art forms. Her interest in video performance drives her creation of self-referential work Trailer (2010), her first cinematographic-like production, as well as her embodying of a historical and emblematic female character like Eva Perón in Rapsodia Inconclusa (55th Venice Biennial, 2013).

Liliana Porter and the Toys of Solitude

Liliana Porter is an Argentinian artist (born, 1941) who has resided in New York since 1964.

Her works are storytelling based on fairy tales and children’s toys. Her oeuvre spans sculpture, photography, video, canvas, print, collage, and installation. Each sculpture is a particular world, a space where the conscious and the unconscious melt together. It is a narrative of imagination obtained by the assemblage of sculptures with small-scale objects, figurines, and utensils -- all part of a collection Porter has accumulated throughout the years.

These objects rarely appear together, they pose always alone; the character appears static in an empty visual field, and if they do engage in a dialogue, they do so with an object of a different species. Each element is distinguished by its discreet fragility, by a thin line between the everlasting and the transitory, where the exercises and the repetition of certain manual gestures constitute the essence of her work. These works, by mean of their small scale, allude to a human being's solitude, highlighting the duration of time and remarking on the importance of space. The issue of solitude is, in fact, Porter’s central theme.

The more perfect the void in which the character is placed, the smaller the object is in relation to its background. Indeed, the small figure contrasts with the vastness of the space. This contrast gives rise to a temporal notion associated to the finite and the infinite, to the vast and the minute.

Thanks to the distortion of the toys into painting and photographs, Porter creates new fictions, which are a fragile narrative exposed to transformations. Porter’s world is timeless, the artwork embodies itself in multiple reflections, as a place of changing point of view as well as an historical space irremediably incomplete that is progressively the subject of new readings. As such, each work assumes an extensive temporal meaning.

Through transformation and enrichment, Liliana Porter combines two parallel languages that allow the opening of a hermetic dialogue toward more complex and multidisciplinary fields, in which the text formulates new ways regarding the pre-established discourse posed by the images themselves.

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra: Hybrids

Born in Chile in 1967, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra grew up under the dictatorship of General Pinochet. From this chapter of Chilean political history and her personal experiences, she developed personal work through a combination of elements that gave rise to non-linear narratives; they appear ecstatic, traumatic, and surreal all at once. Sexuality, popular culture, and death are recurring motifs in her works, which allude to melancholy dreams and apparitions creating and overlapping each other, interlacing a poetic achieved through an austerity of media.

These fictions -- created from a combination of real facts and memories confronted with elements drawn from popular culture, mythology, and literature -- form a tapestry of figures isolated that embody a richness of meanings. These are passages between the dreams and the evocation, where a web of ideas, associations, and hidden stories seem to envelop figures of a magic shape that avoid falling into the abyss.

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra produces drawings on small pieces of paper, employing color pencil and watercolors, followed by the application of a wax bath and a transparent film that provides protection and permanence to each piece. Her work is informed by film, fairy tales, and botanical and zoological textbooks.

Her drawing is concise and made from fluid lines that create personages on a neutral background. In this space, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra often writes words in Spanish, English, and German, with delicate touches of color that show a fragment of the narrative that enhance or complicate the iconography.

Her mysterious and intimate works suggest the influence of Surrealism, Dada, and Francisco Goya's phantasmagoria. The sober figures and the austere monochromatic of the composition reflect a language based on the texture pattern, typography, and the accumulation. Despite this, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s works are fully autonomous and have a very unique and clear sense of their own characteristics, compressing and inventing new territories.

Vásquez de la Horra’s work is part of various public and private collections. It has been exhibited at the Oldenburger Kunstverein, Germany (2012), the Musée d’Art Moderne, St-Etienne (2011), the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht (2010), the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011, 2009), and the Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (2008). The artist was awarded the prestigious Guerlain Prize in 2009. In 2012, she participated in “La Inminencia de las Poéticas” at the 30th São Paulo Biennial.

El Lugar de la Mujer: A Woman's Place

Alicia D'Amico, born in Buenos Aires (1933-2001), was an Argentinian photographer. Camera in hand, she always preferred her photographs in black and white as well as the format of 35 mm.

Alicia graduated from the National School of Fine Arts as Professor of Drawing and Painting in 1953. In 1955, she was awarded a scholarship by the French government and lived in Paris for a year, which allowed her to improve her knowledge in Visual Arts and purchase her first camera.

Two years later, Alicia made her first photographic work thanks to studying and her father who was also a photographer; later, she become assistant to photographer Annemarie Heinrich. Along with Sara Facio, Alicia opened a studio in the 1960s and taught at the School of Photography in Argentina, where she was called "master" by her students.

Between 1983 and 1999, Argentina witnessed a critical mass of women artists emerge who organized exhibitions and events, and challenged the patriarchal discourse. In 1983, alongside the filmmaker Maria Luisa Bemberg, Alicia became cofounder of A Woman’s Place (Lugar de la Mujer). It was one of the first feminist institutions in Argentina to host interdisciplinary feminist activities. It was open to lesbian feminists too, who, in 1986, together with the photographer Ilse Foscova, organized public interventions in favor of women rights.

Alicia's photographic work focused on teaching and collaboration in books, especially with artists and intellectuals of South America such as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Julio Cortázar, Oscar Painter, Alejo Carpentier, Miguel Angel Asturias, Pablo Neruda, and Astor Piazzolla -- many of whom were the subject of her black-and-white portraits. 

Julio Cortázar

Her work has been exhibited in many countries as part of group shows with other artists such as Pedro Luis Raota, Osvaldo Salzamendi Francisco Tenllado, Rubén Sotera, and Alicia Sanguinett but her work has held individual exhibitions worldwide as well. On August 30, 2001, Alicia died in her hometown of Bueno Aires but her photographs continue to enlighten.

María Luisa Bemberg

Jorge Luis Borges, 1963

In Conversation with Ana Álvarez-Errecalde

Q: Blood and nudity seem to be a leitmotif of your work. Why? And what is your relation with them? 


A: I have created many artworks that deal with nudity but only a few that include blood. Many things motivate the direction of my work. I am interested in the vital cycles and the passage of time. I am interested in the body as an intimate territory: a map of registered memories that are not always in line with what religion, science and socioeconomic interests have led us to believe. How I relate to nudity and blood is a mirror of my fascination with life. I am accepting of my changing body, amazed with how my children grow and intrigued by the aging process. I have enjoyed my pregnancies and have had joyful, intense home births. The blood and nudity seen within the context of my artwork is linked to authenticity and undiluted sensuality.

Q: Identity is a repetitive theme in your work. Has identity become so important since you are an Argentinian living in Europe? Is it a need to find and define (or re-define) yourself? 

A: 
I have lived half of my life away from my family and country of origin as an immigrant on two continents. These experiences have influenced my interest in Identity. In other projects, I do not focus so much on nationality as an identifying factor but in those experiences that we live that permeate us and determine the way we see the world.

Q: Female nudity… Is it a sort of re-appropriation of the female figure?
A: Yes. In my artwork I intend to go beyond the physical and aesthetic re-appropriation. My intention when photographing female nudity is also to re-vindicate the right to openly share experiences and add to the collective imagery. Love and sex among the elderly, orgasmic births, scars that leave testimony of a survived experience, all these have something to contribute to our common reality.

Q: It is obvious to me to link Canova’s Le Tre Grazie with your Tres Gracias Sangrantes. What does it mean for you to take a tradition and use it? Is this just an endorsement or are you doing something else with it? 

A: Tres Gracias Sangrantes was conceived as a parody to Canova´s Le Tre Grazie which are supposed to represent beauty, charm and joy and preceded banquets for the mere purpose of delighting the guests of the gods. Raphael created a chaste version of the piece and Rubens painted the Graces in a voluptuous and exuberant way. I wanted to add an irreverent image to the vast voyeuristic and salacious representations in Art.

The advertising industry tries to convince us that women´s blood is blue, that menstrual cycles stink, that menstrual pain is normal and should be medically numbed, and that mood swings are part of a syndrome (PMS) which is treatable by a huge range of pharmaceutical solutions. External control over women´s physiology and psychology reach debates about abortion legality and illegality, backs up the endless interventions on pregnancy and birth which ends up in an incredibly high rate on C-sections in most of the developed countries. 
The external manipulation of women´s hormones sometimes starts in the beginning of adolescence.
 The devalorization of old age sends more and more women in an anguished and frustrating search for eternal youth.
 In Three Bleeding Graces I give visibility to blood in order to denounce the devitalization, domestication and exploitation of this process that negates women.

Q: Is HISTOLOGÍAS a metaphor for the lack of empathy toward others?
A: HISTOLOGIAS proposes getting into someone else´s skin and alludes to the complexity of this act. I present the skin as a canvas which is both influenced by the life that marks us from the outside (aging, illness, aesthetic, etc.) as well as the marks that come from the inside (the subconscious that overflows, explodes and stains).
 There are moments in life when it becomes almost unbearable to fit inside the boundaries that conform who we are, those are the moments when we are able to grow emotionally and expand our limits.

               

Q: ALQUIMIA seems a spiritual work where the absence becomes presence. Would you tell me more about this work?
A: I created this series of photographs and sculptures soon after the death of my sister Bany. We were very alike and very close. We would laugh at the same things, we had the same smile. When she passed away unexpectedly from cancer I could not accept that she was gone. I was searching to be with her in a tangible way as an intent of transcending her absence. I brought her back into my life by creating this collaborative work. I based the artwork on her poetry, which I even embroidered on the dresses that I used for the series.


In Conversation with Azar Emdadi

Born in Iran Western Azerbaijan, Azar Emdad now lives and works in South Yorkshire, UK. She obtained her BA in Multi-disciplinary Design specializing in Photography at Staffordshire Polytechnic in 1989. In 1990, she was commissioned to document the war with Armenia in Soviet Azerbaijan. This extremely sensitive and important work was published internationally in many journals. In 1996, Emdad completed a postgraduate course in Gender Studies at Sheffield Hallam University, where she majored in Women in Film.

Azar's engagement is with art-based concerns, with particular emphasis on social, political, and gender issues. Her works have been widely exhibited both in the UK and internationally, including a solo show at the World Cultural House Berlin, the Silk Road Gallery in Tehran, Iran, the Homeland Society in Baku, North Azerbaijan along with UK-based group shows, including Stoke-on-Trent Museum, St. David Hall Cardiff, the Rose Issa Project, and many more. Azar’s work has been collected by many private collectors, including the Salsali Private Museum Dubai.

Dinner in Tehran is a series of 12 images, inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting of The Last Supper. These images explore the various paradoxes that exist within Iranian society today; the issue of public and private personas, the fractured identities, censorship, religion and strict social codes, which result in many Iranians living a double life.

All 12 images show the same woman center stage, putting the role of a woman at the heart of Iranian society. In each image, the table is properly set and the food is plentiful as it plays a fundamental role in Iranian society, joining people together on a daily basis. These images are of young actors, professional models, friends and family members. Using the perspective of an Iranian woman living in the West, Azar Emdadi reexamines and questions representations of Islamic identity.

Q: You were born in Iran but you are living in the UK. How much and in which ways do these opposite cultures mark your works?
A: Being an Iranian living in the West, I feel myself curiously ‘bound’ equally to both. It is as if being caught between the divergent cultures of both East and West have somehow re-‘molded’ my perspectives, allowing me to appreciate and understand them in new ways. Because of this, I find myself politically, psychologically and emotionally torn. So much so, that even time spent in either sphere is physically disorienting. This continual conflict within my life has shaped – and continues to – my character and personality. Being centered from within, my principles and values clearly reflect these influential conflictions externally through my work.

Q: What does it mean for you to take a tradition and use it – is this just an endorsement or are you doing something else with it – something unexpected?
A: Contemporary art today explores ideas, concepts, questions, and practices that examine the past. This means using tradition as a vehicle, a visual platform to describe the present, and imagine the future. Often this helps to understand the underlying questions one is trying to answer and the ideology, or label it is subject to. Contemporary art can often seem overwhelming, difficult, or so simple that the viewer might wonder if they are missing something. Sometimes to understand where the behavior comes from, it is necessary to study the values and beliefs of the traditions that underpin them. It is an intensely personal undertaking for any artist to look into their own traditions to seek understanding. So, for myself, I see what is happening today in my homeland, and I ask why certain traditions are disappearing and how these experiences have an impact on how Iranians see themselves on the world stage. It is hard to realise that, because of this, many younger Iranians are losing interest in their own culture and heritage.

Mira Schendel: Portrait of a Brazilian Artist

Myrra Dagmar Dub, known as Mira Schendel (1919-1988), was a Brazilian artist. Born in Zurich, to parents of Jewish heritage, Schendel was raised in Italy as a catholic and studied philosophy at the Catholic University in Milan. In 1938, she was displaced of her Italian nationality and forced to end her study. After traveling across many countries in 1949, she arrived in Brazil where she began her career as an artist.

She said of her arrival there, "I started painting in Brazil. Life was very hard, there was no money for paints, but I used to buy cheap materials and paint like crazy. It was a matter of life or death for me."

In fact, in order to make a living, she worked as a graphic designer producing posters, illustrations, and book covers. She drew inspiration from artists such as Giorgio Morandi, Giorgio de Chirico, and Paul Klee. Her work constitutes an experimental investigation into profound philosophical questions relating to human existence and belief, addressing the distinction between faith and certainty, being and nothingness, and the "void."

The painting of the 1960s are characterized by a move towards geometry. Schendel remarked, "No matter how much I use geometric shapes, the sensory element of the brushstroke, the texture, is always there; for me this is very important. I would never make a completely smooth painting."

Interestingly, spiral motifs recur in all her oeuvre. Often compared to Archimedean spirals which describe, in mathematical terms, the unending spiral recession of a point in time and space, away from fixed point. Schendel also started a series of works using semi-transparent rice paper in 1964, investigating themes of transparency and language by the use of letters as graphic elements.

Her most enigmatic works are The Return of Achilles (1964) and Apologia pro vita sua (1974), both with reference to the Homer's epic poem the Iliad.

Although little-known outside Brazil, Mira Schendel remains a unique and influential figure in twentieth-century art.

Meriem Bouderbala: Female Arab Art

When we speak about the Arab Countries, and specifically of Arab Women, we immediately associate them with the idea of harem, veil, and dance. Arab women are seen as oppressed and repressed by a culture that does not leave space for the feminine side of itself. This can be true if applied to a certain sphere of that culture. But, it is also true that female Arab artist have come a long way to gain recognition in the contemporary art world. This is the case of the Tunisian Meriem Bouderbala.

By using her own body in her work, the artist challenges the enduring Orientalist vision of the image of the Arab women by comparing her own body with that of exoticism that become established in the collective imaginary. Meriem studied painting and engraving at the school of Beaux-arts in Provence from 1980 to 1985 obtaining a Post-Graduate Diploma in Plastic Arts. She then moved to London in 1986 to study engraving at the Chelsea School of Art.

Since 1986, Meriem has exhibited her artwork frequently in Tunisia and throughout Europe. Meriem’s work has received wide recognition and she has won a number of prizes and important commissions. Some of her work are parts of the permanent collection of the Arab World Institute in Paris.

Meriem’s work is theoretically conditioned by her passion to explore and exploit the potential of "minority art," or contemporary art that works outside of traditional schools of thought. Her works play with photography and installation, and challenges the body representation and identification of oneself and of the other.

Saloua Raouda Choucair at Tate Modern

For the first time in its history, Tate Modern has dedicated the world’s first major museum exhibition to Lebanese artist Saloua Raouda Choucair.

Choucair (born in Lebanon, 1916) is a pioneer of abstract art in the Middle East. Through painting and drawing, architecture, textiles and jewelry, as well as her abundant sculptures, one can understand how Choucair worked in different media following her interests in science, mathematics, Islamic art, and poetry.

The exhibition focuses on Choucair’s sculptures from the 1950s to the 1980s, created in wood, metal, stone, and fibreglass, as well as extensive examples of her early abstract paintings.

The show opens, with a youthful Self-portrait from 1943, a stylized rendering of a serious young woman. This painting was made shortly after Choucair began painting under the tutelage of leading Lebanese artists Mustafa Farroukh and Omar Onsi. Contrary to the tastes of her teachers, Choucair developed a passion for Islamic art and architecture during a trip to Egypt in 1943. Choucair’s work combines elements of western abstraction with Islamic aesthetics.

The domestic scene explored in the three versions of Les Peintres Celebres was most likely based on Leger’s Le Grand Déjeuner, (she studied in the studio of Fernand Léger in Paris) a large painting depicting a harem of three naked women having tea around a small table. But rather than recreate the scene a la Léger, Choucair instead conducted a deliberate, feminist ‘de-Légerisation.’

The major work in the opening galleries is an exquisite little painting called Paris-Beirut. An Islamic star, Cleopatra's Needle, the colours of the desert, the Arc de Triomphe: all are reduced to their essential forms and held in perfect balance in the picture.

The exhibition's last room has beauty in abundance, numerous sculptures: some are planetary, evoking eclipses and starbursts. Others have affinities with womankind – corkscrew curls, metal bows and gyrating curves – and the quirkiest are highly strung, shivering excitedly as one passes. Even without any knowledge of the Sufi principles apparently underlying this art, one has the sense of a free and humorous spirit perpetually at work.

Choucair's sculptures fuse Islamic design with modernist traditions. Like her paintings they are small-scale, vibrant and cleverly balanced. One of these sculptures, carved out of wood, with joint, seems to vibrate from top to bottom with interior life – unseen human existence.

Choucair’s sculptures often resemble architectural structures, in particular those with repeated units, such as modular housing. She once said that given another life to live she would choose to be an architect.

In Conversation with Sarah Maple

Why do you define yourself an artist? And what is the role that art has in your everyday life?
I think it is there in my everyday life because I see art in everything…especially conversations. I always pick up on things people say and use them in my work, or they inspire a piece. Everything I see everyday from TV, advertising, the internet, family and friends, all these things influence me and inform the decisions I make as an artist.

Why do you consider yourself a “Feminist?” And what is for you “Feminism?”

To me feminism is a much broader term than what it is perceived. For me it all about equality, equality between all people. It’s funny how so many people agree on these principles but so scared of the word ‘feminism’. In my work I use humour and other ways to getting across this message, like a trojan horse.

I know you use art in different ways: paintings, video, photography, and performance… What work do you most enjoy doing?
It’s hard to say because I love them all, I take joy in them all. I always saw myself primarily as a painter but photography opened up so much for me as well. I love how each media can say and do so much used in the right way.

What do you want to achieve and/or demonstrate with your art?
For me the most important thing about the art is the message, I want to make people think and I want to bring about change. I want my work to challenge what is seen as ‘the norm’. I always aim to make my viewer question the world around them. I’m not sure art has the same power that it used to, but I try my best!

I have seen in your work that ‘Islam’ is a repeated topic, I know you have a mixed religious background , but why for you is it so important to talk about it?
I haven’t made work on this theme for a few years now, it was something at the time that I felt the urge to speak about and comment on. Not only was I commenting on the world around me but on my own life experiences with I felt was a reflection on the current political climate. People often ask if I will return to this theme….as a muslim it is part of who I am so I think I will return to it at some point but not right now. I felt I’ve said what I needed to say.

What do you want to denounce in your performance “ It's just like any other job really - dedicated to world peace?”
The piece was inspired by artist Santiago Serra who had a successful show in London at the time. I found the great thing about performance is that you can have an idea about what you want to say and how you want yourself/viewers to feel, but you will only really know the impact when you are performing. In this piece we had 30 girls doing a ‘Miss World’ catwalk and then standing silently against a wall for a whole day. It looked incredible but was very hard work, 5 girls fainted. The gallery was all glass and the viewer had to look from the outside, like we were untouchable in this goldfish bowl. It was a very surreal experience, being watched in this way….definitely an experience I won’t forget!

Can women do everything?
Yes!

In Conversation with Raeda Saadeh

The Tree of Wishes - Performance 

Why do you define yourself as an artist?
Actually it is very sensitive for me when I say I am an artist, because when I look at the art history for instance Michelangelo, I question myself: who am I? Am I an artist? It is not easy for me to say I am an artist. Though, I have this feeling when people talk about my art, when I do an exhibition and others speak of me as an artist, in those moments I recognise myself as an artist.
I teach in two different universities in Palestine and in Israel, in two different languages, and the students are just starting to study and they already say “I am an artist”. So I think it is not difficult to say, “I am an artist.”

What is the role that art has in your everyday life?
I brief art. I don’t have a studio at home, but I have my sketchbook always with me everywhere I go and I am always writing my ideas. I am always talking about art, through which, with Palestine occupied, we can express our problems through art.

Do you consider yourself a “feminist”?
When I am with other artists, we always talk about feminism. For me there are so many things to talk about before talking about feminism. The right of a woman of being considered a human came before feminism in my opinion. This is the concept I am dealing with. I am talking about women that cannot study or work, because their families are really poor. I am talking about something that is normal in other parts of the world, but that here is more difficult. I am talking about being. Feminism is a further step for me to talk about.

For instance, last week I went to this place and I worked with two women of 60 and 70. They didn’t have food to eat. I guess this is a priority, rather than think about feminism. There are many things to work with right now that I cannot focus on feminism. I am more concerned about the problem of being a human.

You use your image in all your work. Is that your way to interact personally with the world? Why? Is it a sort of re-appropriation of female figure?
The way I do my art it is always with me. I am in my art. I always put myself into it. I use my image. I am always performing. When I take a photograph for example I feel myself as if I am doing a performance. For me my artworks are my babies. I am art myself.

Do you think it is correct to label the art of Middle East artists as “Arab or Islamic” art? And, do you define yourself as “Arab” artist?
I am Muslim, I am Arab, I am from Palestine, but I don’t like being labelled especially as “Islamic artist” as I don’t feel I am showing Islamic art.

I can accept that I am a Middle Eastern artist, and I am happy and proud of it, but how could I be defined as an Arab artist? What does it mean? There are many Arab artists that never lived in an Arab country, but they do art. What to call them? How can you define their art as Arab? This identification is very sensitive.

A Room of One's Own: Women and Power in the New America

A Room of One's Own: Women and Power in the New America (2006) by Cuban-American artist Coco Fusco (born 1960 New York City) is a powerful performance inspired by Virginia Woolf's famous essay, which deals with women and war.

The show begins with the artist wearing the typical U.S. army uniform, and she is on a stage performing the role of an interrogator. The American flag opens behind her and two screens: one projecting the traditional image of the eagle, the emblem of United States, and the sentence: United we stand. The other shows a CCTV live video of a prisoner in an interrogation room of Guantanamo. In this setting, Fusco makes the traditional military salute.

As a whole, the flags, the salute, and the other symbols transmit the same feeling and pride that reigns among the American soldiers, and their belief in a mission of developing civilization and democracy in the name of freedom.

As part of the performance, there is a manual in a PowerPoint presentation entitled, A Field guide for Female Interrogators’ describing the ‘tactics’ of interrogation. The use of this manual is and employs the hegemony of the power. In her speech, she satirically emphasizes the great achievement on the part of women and the use of their femininity in joining the war.

The entire performance addresses the Guantanamo Bay Camp and Abu Ghraib and is focused on the "Arab subject." The manual refers to Arab inhibitions in relation to sexuality, exposure, homosexuality, nudity, shame, and taboo; and arrogant women half-naked making explicit sexual gestures against the prisoners and violating their "religious doctrine." The woman is playing the role of a heroine, who triumphs against evil Muslims.

Through her work, Fusco reminds us that the conquest of sexuality has nothing to do with reversal roles of power and submission, and that it is not a competition of physical attributes.

A Room of One’s Own addresses the theme of military interrogations and demonstrates that the mission of civilization hides a policy of oppression, which leaves very little room for the value of democracy, freedom, and respect of cultural and gender diversities.

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. Her work combines electronic media and performance in several formats and explores the relationship between women and society, war, politics and race. She is a recipient of a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco's performances and videos have been presented in two Whitney Biennials (2008 and 1993), the Sydney Biennale, The Johannesburg Biennial, The Kwangju Biennale, The Shanghai Biennale, InSite O5, Mercosul, Transmediale, The London International Theatre Festival, VideoBrasil, and Performa05. Her works have also been shown at the Tate Liverpool, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona.

Fusco is the author of English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995), The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001), and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). She is also the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003). Coco Fusco received her B.A. in Semiotics from Brown University (1982), her M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (1985), and her Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University (2007).

Is Mona Hatoum a Surrealist Palestinian?

Mona Hatoum ( b. 1952, Lebanon) was born into a Palestinian family in Beirut. She often explores the danger and limit of everyday objects, giving them a new vision of interpretation. Her poetic and political oeuvre is realized in a different range of media: installation, sculpture, video photography and work on paper can be interpreted as a description of the body, gender and a commentary on politics.

All her earlier works draw a strong link with the condition of Palestine people. Although born in Lebanon, she always emphasizes her belonging to Palestine, but expresses frustration when that of "nationality" is the only interpretation that the audience gives to her works.

One of her most celebrated works is a video "Measure of distance" she made in 1988. Hatoum produced this video of letters written by her mother in Beirut to her in London. The video is a sensual conversation between two women, mother and daughter, in which the former speaks openly about feelings, sexuality and femininity.

                                     

"Although the main thing that comes across is a very close and emotional relationship between mother and daughter, it also speaks of exile, displacement, disorientation and a tremendous sense of loss as a result of the separation caused by war." ¹

                                     

“View Siege” (1982) was a performance piece in which she was trapped in a large glass container entirely covered in clay. She tried several times to stand but repeatedly slipped and fell as the clay from her body smelted. It was a clear reference to the condition in Palestine as a country living in continuous siege. A collage of sound from different directions and in different languages was the background of the event.

Hatoum’s work is strongly evaluated as existing in the space between the Duchamp’s ready-mades surrealism and minimalism through her way of exploring objects and giving them a metaphoric interpretation via different framework. To explore the way in which she manipulates the object it is interesting to look at “Untitled (Wheelchair II), produced in 1999.

At first glance, the object looks unremarkable in its status, but as soon as one looks closer the differences come across: the chair itself is very uncomfortable and the wheels are very small, consequently the object is useless in its purpose and what appeared is different from the reality.
She took part in the Venice Biennale in 1995 and 2005 and has received numerous international awards, including the Joan Miró Prize in Barcelona (2011), the Käthe Kollwitz Prize in Berlin (2010), the Rolf Schock Prize in Stockholm (2008) and an honorary doctorate from the American University of Beirut (2008).

Today Mona lives and works in London and Berlin, exploring daily through her works, the duality of belonging to a Country of Arab tradition as well as to belong at the other, the “adoptive one” in which prejudice is overcome and freedom is a right of everybody.

1. Quoted in Mona Hatoum 1977, P.140

In Conversation With Floria Gonzales

Fragil by Floria Gonzales

In November, I met Floria Gonzalez in New York for the occasion of Pinta, The Latin American Art Show, where her works were exhibited. I immediately fell in love with the images, so delicate, feminine, and tender are her photos. At first glance, they capture you in a purely colorful and pretty way, but if you get closer and read into them, you are gradually immersed in a double and dark world… the secret world of Floria Gonzalez.

Floria grew up on the border between Mexico and Texas. She studied photography and cinematography and divides her life between the two arts. New York was cold, so we ended up in a bar warming up with a cup of tea and talking about art.

FC: How much does your Country influence your works?

FG: It does of course, but travelling inspires me as well, because you dare more and can take pictures that have to do with other cultures and you can expand your vision.

FC: You are one of the few contemporary female artists that does not use her body to make art. Nowadays it is almost a fashion, there is an overexposure of the female artist’s body, you on the contrary use other faces, other people, you like more staying on the other side, you like more to observe… Isn’t it?

FG: Yes, most of what I do is about me, because it speaks of me but I am more observing what is going on with the human being.

FC: You said you like reading and the cinema. There are some directors or writers that inspire you?

FG: Yes, of course. For some reasons Japanese culture gives me a lot. I love their art that is much “inside” introspective and I identify myself a lot with that, because I am like that and it is also what I do. In fact, some pieces take some moments of H. Muramaki and B. Yoshimoto’s books.

When I was younger I loved the horror cine. I think some of the ’80 horror cine’s aesthetics is evident in my works. Later I discovered another kind of horror cine, more psychological like the one of D. Lynch and A. Hitchcock, I found this way of making movies more realistic and richer in content than the 80’s, but probably the latter was only an extension of the former. I believe that Lynch’s aesthetic influenced me a lot.

FC: But your artworks seems far from horror.

FG: Yes, I know, but I like to play as well with the psychology and with the idea of the good and the bad. I always try to play with light and smoke giving the piece a kind of theatrical atmosphere, like my series To Fall.

I like to make work nice outside, delicate for the viewer, but with a deep and dark meaning if you look at it properly and deeply.

Nosotros by Floria Gonzales

FC: Do you want to transmit any kind of message through your art or you want to express only your interior world?

FG: No, really I do not think about anything, I only do what comes inside of me.

FC: In the series SMOTHER there are some images of children which I found really interesting. Would you tell me something about it?

FG: Childhood is the moment in life in which we are still innocent, in which every single act can hurt us and can leave a mark on us for the rest of our life. Adults are responsible for the growth and there are some kinds of violence that can mark a child forever.

For instance in Lourdes the baby is strong, she will face her life although something is going on in her life. On the contrary, in Maria you can notice on her arm there is a mark, with which I wanted to emphasize that she lost her innocence forever and her life will never be the same again.

Maria, Smother

Lourdes, Smother

FC: How do you feel more realized as a photographer or video maker? What do you feel you are more?

FG: It is different, because with video there are so many people I work with. I am surrounded by people. With the photography, I instead work with maximum 2 people and it is more intimate, and what I am actually looking for in this moment is to work on my own. That is why I am thinking of developing this technique on cotton paper and I will work alone.

FC: Completely alone? Without any protagonist?

FG: Yes, I am going to account the story of the landscapes. I am going out of the studio, I feel I need it. I need air. I need Nature.

FC: Do you define yourself a photographer or an artist?

FG: An artist. I would not like to be labelled in a category. I am also looking for other media to express myself.

Floria Gonzalez currently lives and works in Mexico City and San Antonio, Texas.

Jenny Saville : A Painter of Modern Life

“… She is a divinity, a star, which presides at all the conceptions of the brain of man; a glittering conglomeration of all the graces of Nature, condensed into a single being; the object of the keenest admiration and curiosity that the picture of life can offer its contemplator. She is not, I must admit, an animal whose component parts, correctly assembled, provide a perfect example of harmony; she is not even that type of pure beauty which the sculptor can mentally evoke in the course of his sternest meditations; no, this would still not be sufficient to explain her mysterious and complex spell.”[1] 

This is Baudelaire's description of women in his essay, The painter of modern life, which is how Jenny Saville, "a painter of modern life," defines herself. But on the contrary, Saville's women are not sensual, they do not embody the classical contemporary western beauty, they are not like plastic dolls that society wants to inculcate as a symbol of perfection; Saville's women are fat, the subjects are represented as crude, they are true, they are dismissed, you can feel the flesh, you are not dispensed by their impudence. Saville broke with the traditional aesthetic norms of legibility and corporality. Born in Cambridge in 1970, she is a contemporary British painter, associated with the Young British Artist. 

Saville's paintings are often compared with the work of Lucian Freud (1922-2011), most probably for the same crude way of depicting the average female form.

Although Saville admits the comparison with Freud, her greatest impacts are Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning, and she has said the "marriage of Bacon’s figurative skills and de Kooning’s painting skills would make the best painter who ever lived." [2]

She is one of the few contemporary artists using the classic technique of making art: painting. Although some contemporary critics may define her works démodé, that, indeed, makes her a special artist. Her passion for art and desire of being a painter have fluttered inside her since she was born. Saville won a six-month scholarship at the University of Cincinnati,  where she states she became "interested in the malls, where you saw lots of big women. Big white flesh in shorts and T-shirts. It was good to see, because they had the physicality that I was interested in. "[3] She became very well known when Charles Saatchi 'discovered' and supported her, proposing she paint 18 canvases that would be subsequently exhibited in his gallery.

Her large-scale paintings are so impacting, the bodies so big that sometimes they seem that even the canvas isn't enough to contain them. Saville plays with the role of women, with their bodies, with their femininity. Despite the fatness, her women are attractive, one can almost smell the fragrance of their flesh, one can be totally immersed in this world in which beauty is not a matter of weight.

“Plan” 1993, Oil on Canvas, 274.5 x 213.5 cm.
The Saatchi Collection, London

Saville moved to New York in 1994, where she was able to sit in and observe the work of the plastic surgeon Dr. Barry Martin Weintraub. Looking at these cosmetic surgery and liposuctions allowed her to gain a better understanding of the human body and the various manipulations that can be made through modern medicine.

As a result of this observation-study, Saville creates a painting such as “Plan,” in which she draws the sign of liposuction (from ancient Greek, lipos = fat) on the body of yet another obese woman portrayed in her paintings. 

But why is Saville so interested in fatness? What does she want to demonstrate transfiguring and exaggerating the female body? Can her work be considered a provocation to the canon of western beauty?