1st - 16th June
The Crypt
Emily Newman, Rock n’ Roll Wolf (US)
Factory of Found Clothes (Gluklya & Tsaplya), Three Mothers and a Chorus (Russia)
Julie Orser, Playback (US)
Veronika Ryzantseva-Rudeva, Tanya (Russia)
The four works in Project
Elektra, produced by artists in different parts of the world, represent
points on a timeline of any woman’s life, points when biology and society
collude and prompt her to transform.
Project Electra brings these works together in an attempt to
show how four artists enact a cathartic projection of the issues that concern
them. Although responsibilities to others change as we cycle through roles in
life, and the psychological effects of bodily transformation never cease to
surprise, these works indicate that through the act of self-representation, aspects
of the self that are constant can be revealed.
California based artist Julie Orser presents us with the
‘budding adolescent’ nuzzled in her bedroom. All dressed up with nowhere to go,
we observe the video diary she records for a future self as it comes to life in
semi-psychadelic forms on her walls in Playback
(2012). On the other side of the world, Veronika Rudyeva-Ryazantseva shows us
the dramatic reality of another girl’s bedroom. Tanya is captured in the process of transformation, as Rudyeva-Ryazantseva
explains, “By the year 2000, "children of Perestroika" had grown up,
and a new reality willingly opened its door to them - the strip club.” Tanya
excitedly whirls around her room like a child exploring a dress-up box, but she
is showing us the costumes and routines of her new job as a sex-worker.
On the opposite shore from girlhood, two works in the show focus on the social and psychological conditions presented to new mothers. In the monumental Three Mothers and a Chorus, St Petersburg artists Gluklya and Tsaplya dramatically create images of three contemporary women, each employing different strategies toward childrearing. Nowhere is the right path revealed and each woman is condemned to harsh judgment by a singing jury made up of clashing voices in the community, at the end of which, the figure of the child reassures (or taunts) the mother in a sickly-sweet falsetto.
Emily Newman’s work, Mama-Wolf dramatizes an expatriate mother’s relationship with her bilingual son in the context of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tale. The American mother and her Russian-born son play a game, manipulating puppets of themselves inside a model of their country shack or dacha. The mother tries to learn how her child negotiates the divide between his Russian and English-speaking personae in order to follow him into the linguistic territory usually denied her. Through the narrative frame of the fairy tale, motherhood is revealed to be an uncanny condition, at once resisting invasion and bemoaning exclusion.
http://bristolbiennial.com/
