Solo exhibition – Private and/or Public
“Private and/or Public”
8.06.2021 – 26.06.2021 Ilija M.Kolarac Endowment, Belgrade
Can we be aware of the line between private and public activity in our lives? Is that harder if the subject is the one who creates? Weaving in her room, did my grandmother ever think that by creating that piece of material on the loom, her life would go from a private to a public one (inaccessible to her at the time)? By transposing a piece of textile that I weave by hand into an object titled installation in space, I break through the thin line between the private and the public. I make the soft structure of the fabric stop, freezing it, making it hard as stone, so that the outside view can feel how it slides under my fingers, rounded and tender. The production of material on the loom is a very intimate physical moment in which energy moves harmoniously through our body and by repeating the same procedures produces a rhythmic sound with which thoughts relax. The procedure can be viewed as meditative, cathartic, but very private and intimate. Observed throughout history, weaving has been the product of those who spend most of their time at home, who take care of the family and mostly women’s work. For a long time, it had the characteristic of decorative art, the one that is less valuable compared to the art produced by the big names in art history, done mostly by the male gender. As a craft or decorative art, weaving remained in the intimate zone. With its softness, colors, seductive charm, we read it as a woman’s energy. When I shape such energy and publicly present it into an object, it becomes a political act. It suggests a vague line of her private and public actions, a life full of content and obligations, a departure from flexibility, and as such contextualized through an artistic act. In the second part of the research, I analyze the term “Virdžina”(Virgin) by getting acquainted with the film of the same name directed by Srdjan Karanović, shot in 1991 in Yugoslavia. Along with the feminist reading of the mentioned film in doctoral dissertation of Suzana Milevska, I enter the research of the phenomenon of gender replacement which is built and patriarchal encouraged. The story describes Stevan, a young heir to the family cursed by the fact that there are too many female offspring. Stevan’s own family condemns him to live as a boy, although he was born as a girl. His family is actually following the custom of “swearing virgins” (“virgin” or “tobelia”) to avoid condemnation of society because it has exclusively female offspring. There are various reasons for becoming Virginia, and Stevans case from the abovementioned film is just one of them. It can also be from purely personal incentives, when young girls do not have the identity of the sex and the gender with which they were born. Also, there are some cases where grieving for a lost partner, women took the vow to be Virgin, so they could escape potential arranged and unwanted marriage. In this way, they commit themselves to eternal virginity, which separates them from the category of the woman, does not include them into the category of a man, but certainly creates the possibility of permanent exclusion from the obligation to be a woman. With the status of Virginia, women are certainly gaining freedom of movement in a public domain, but not so much in a private, hidden area of women’s life. In all these cases, I analyze the patriarchal situation in the mountainous rural areas of the Balkans: Northern Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro, where the Virdžina phenomenon is still present. Written documents testify that the existence of a phenomenon dates back to the 1860, and in a recent Vice documentary we can see that there are still Virdžinas, of course in a much smaller number than before, and that they represent the oldest third gender in Europe. The visualvocabulary that I use to transpose this phenomenon in visual speech uses elements that symbolically depict the private and public domain in the life of a woman / man / Virgin. It is based on the motifs of the mountain parts of the Balkans, as a symbol of the public and free movement. As a reflection of the way of life in remote places and the patriarchate that is still present in them. The chosen motif is portrayed on a media that is traditionally related to women’s handicrafts and the private sphere of her life: embroidery, sewing, batik painting textiles, decorative painting of fabrics, needles and kitchen cloths. Thus, these two areas intertwine, blur and postulate the gender and gender positions, which in the case of Virginia are socially constructed. (In this text I am using the information found in the scientific works Suzana Milevski, Predrag Šarčević and Marko Kokotec, Virdžina films Srđan Karanović and “The Last Balkan Virginia” Vice Serbia)
