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Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS: L.A Raeven - The Height of Vanity | Dolores : Normal Work - Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz - 6 Sept 2008 to 11 Oct 2008 Current Exhibition |
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L.A Raeven - The Height of Vanity
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L.A Raeven - The Height of Vanity The work of L.A.Raeven deals with the ideal image of beauty; The image of female beauty in fashion and media, created by the dominant western society. People are losing their identity and don't see the beauty of their own image anymore. In fact, people admire the western ideal and start to dislike their own identity. Sun Mei & Lu Yang are obsessed with their appearance, in particular with their body proportions. Like many other Chinese women and men, they want to be taller. The western ideal of the perfect body has found it's way into modern China and to have the longer legs that guarantee a successful life, young people decide to undergo a very painful leg lengthening operation. Sun Mei's legs have both been broken and a steel pin was inserted on each side of the bone. Attached to a stretching devise, the pins had to be tightened on a daily base, despite the unbearable pain this gave her. In The Height of Vanity the L.A.Raeven sisters follow Sun Mei and her friend Lu Yang in their path towards a perfect body. The film covers the subject of taking control over your own body, of making a life changing choice. The influence of the media on women is very strong, but even stronger is the influence women heave on each other. If your friends make themselves 'better' you are seduced to do the same. It is an influence that goes together with feelings as jealousy and guilt, and with social codes which results in exclusion or inclusion in 'the group'. The Height of Vanity, 2008, video installation, photographs and files. Dolores: Normal Work - Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz Film, 13 Min (16 mm. on DVD) and part of an archive (25 photographs of Hannah Cullwick, 1855-1902, Trinity College, London) Hannah Cullwick not only cleaned from early in the morning to late in the evening in various households, she also produced a series of remarkable staged photographs, numerous diaries, and letters. These materials present her strength, her muscles, and her big, dirty hands: embodiments of her gender that were obviously directly connected with her working practices and which she was very proud of. Hannah Cullwick�s portraits and self-portraits, which show her not only as a domestic servant, but also in "class drag" or "ethnic drag", where part of a sadomasochistic relationship that she had with Arthur Mumby, a man from the bourgeois class. Interestingly, it was the elements of her hard work in the households that provided the material for their shared SM scenes. The work that Cullwick carried out as a domestic servant was later restaged together with Mumby in their meetings in his home. Cullwick described herself as Mumby�s slave, she wore a "slave band" on her wrist, which she never took off, and a chain and padlock on her neck, whose key was belonged by Mumby. She called him "massa", a name, which - like "slave"- referred to England's reality as a colonial power. The crossings of social positions that she staged in the photographs - which show her as a bourgeois woman, as a young bourgeois man, or as a slave in blackface - partly also play a role in Cullwick�s everyday life, for instance when she travelled with Arthur Mumby in "bourgeois drag". The photographs can be understood as a technology to control these crossings, or to reflect on the great efforts and constant deliberation that were connected to them. The film "normal work" asks whether the crossings of social hierarchies of class, gender, and "race" that Hannah Cullwick staged and that she obviously desired have today become generalized into a paradoxical requirement in the field of labour. Performer: Werner Hirsch Camera: Bernadette Paassen Sounddesign: Rashad Becker Berlin, 2007 Opening: Saturday 6 September, 17 - 19 hours Duration of the show: 6 September - 11 October Gallery hours: Tuesday - Saturday 13 - 18 hours And 1st Sunday of the month 14 - 17 hours (and by appointment) Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS Rozengracht 207 A, 1016 LZ Amsterdam The Netherlands T +31(0)20 5304994 F +31(0)20 5304990 E [email protected] |
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