08/01/2019 Severine Grosjean
Art swallows, digests, and produces objects. These objects are like remains of a deep and sometimes dark fantasy life. The body is an intimate representation of the world.
Marina Marković is an artist who explores both the personal and social aspects of dietary ideologies. In her previous work, the artist used her own body to artistically document the healing process of anorexia, in which, in her own words, she treated the body as a “sculptural material.”
Marina Markovic’s personal experience in the field of anorexia places her work in a constant relationship with maturation and sexuality; themes of consumerism and postmodern society. Her work is both a representative and performative practice of making the networks of various social systems visible and embodying contemporary consumer structures.
In her latest work, including the video performance “Chewing and Spitting,” the artist explores pathological behaviors related to food consumption. Marina links this phenomenon to the modern society of global consumption, which emphasizes hedonism and the satisfaction of consumer needs (for food and other products), while imposing a media conception of the “ideal body”. The refusal of the female body in curves as a rejection of passivity and the glorification of a body without forms is a paradox in her works. This approach implies that the social construction of femininity brings the girl to identify with the social role that conveys a dependent, weak, submissive and sexualized image of women.
Marina makes us aware of the way our body interacts with the world, allowing awareness of social oppressions and a reappropriation of our body and our internal world. It is “re-appropriating a look”, in other words, the power to rebuild the self-image.
“Pressure me” is an installation of the body consisting of a tattoo in real size which represents a sewing meter fixed on an ideal proportion of 60cm. This work associates the body of women with its norm imposed from the outside and pushes it to the limits of the inverse pressure.
Images created from television commercials depicting ecstatically distorted women, delighted by products such as laundry detergents, shampoos, sanitary napkins, washing liquids.
In this work, the body and its modifications represent the environment and the object of art. Her recent works have shifted from bodily practices to the treatment of objects, questioning consumption and the processes of personal de–subjectivation through consumption.
Thus, art refers to life itself, to pure activity, to practice. The art couple Marina Marković and Boris Šribar use the gallery as a temporary place of residence. It evokes the media and manipulative strategies of forms such as reality shows: by moving these strategies into the artistic context, they indicate a global contamination. Art documents life as pure activity. Marina Marković and Boris Šribar consciously refer to practices such as the Occupy Wall Street movement or the increasingly important student protests – a temporary stay in and within a certain space becomes a political gesture par excellence. Winston Churchill said, “Criticism can be unpleasant, but it is necessary, it is like pain for the human body: it draws attention to what is wrong”
Partnership: The Nomad Creative Projects
