Marina Marković
– (Belgrade, 1983) graduated in 2008 from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, where she is currently pursuing a PhD at the Department of New Media. Since 2006, she has been regularly participating in individual and group exhibitions, domestically and abroad. She has participated in numerous artist-in-residence programs, including ISCP (The International Studio & Curatorial Program) in New York and Q21 – MuseumsQuartier in Vienna. She is the winner of several important awards, such as the Young Visual Artist Award, i.e. Dimitrije Baśićević Mangelos for the year 2011 and the Award for Drawing from the Vladimir Veličković Foundation for the year 2021.
There is no reality besides corporeality since the female body is a threshold where nature and science confront culture. (Marija Ratković)
The body and bodily practices are the central motive of my artistic work, which fluctuates between dealing with personal experiences and studying complex social issues in relation to the female body. The relationship toward the body in my artistic practice ranged from the objectification of my own body to the treatments of bodily rituals and the connection between physiological, biological, psychological and political experiences. The experience of anorexia in early youth determined the course of my artistic work towards body politics, constructing and deconstructing gender and sexuality, as well as the economy of desire.
In the work Anorexia Diary1 I documented daily the period from the onset of the condition, which began with starvation and obsession with food, to the nine-month treatment of anorexia in the hospital and recovery. In the work Anorexia, Before and After2 I documented a one year “process” of recovery from anorexia, and I treated my body as sculptural material, while in the participatory video performance Chewing and Spitting3, I indicated the spectrum of pathological behaviors related to food consumption.
In the seven-year-long project Pressure me4 through various media (video, performance, sculpture, installation, etc) I tried to present and explore societal pressure on the female body, while dealing with all the painful daily rituals that women go through with their bodies in order to achieve/attain/come close to socially constructed ideals of beauty.
Exploring the porous boundary between free will and social / biopolitical coercion in the life of a woman/artist is mostly shown in the video work Void5 in which the ultrasound of my empty uterus is dialectically opposed to a sound image, female polyphony (the voices of my great-grandmother, two grandmothers, aunt, and mother), who speak about primary female roles and duties.
For over a decade I have been tattooing on my own skin various societal pressures in pink ink, in order to deconstruct them through that reflection, and so cancel them. The skin is a semi-permeable border between the self and the outside world and an ideal surface for the projection of stereotypes, while the act of tattooing is not just writing on the body, but also one of the strategies in taking the body back from society and an act of rebellion.
Through a series of performances titled Pressure me678 (2012 – 2014) I mapped my body with pink tattoos of a tailor’s meter, with which I tied my waist, breasts and hips to “ideal measures” (90-60-90cm) with the intention of “permanently” capturing them in this material form and forcing them to expand, deform, distort along with me. In the works To Please, To Serve, To Obey9; It’s Not Yours to Choose10; There is no reality beside corporeality11 and Servitude12 on the surface of my skin I discuss the duality of natural / voluntary, surface / internal, discursive and indicated. In the potentially lifelong performance The Arrangement13141516, I invite various art institutions and galleries with which I’ve collaborated to choose a part of my body to tattoo their logo and I question power relations in the artworld on my own skin.
Long-term work with corpo-real, what Elizabeth Grosz calls “the state of corporeal existence”, enabled me to closely explore the concepts of satisfaction, pleasure and jouissance within a woman’s life, and their connection with the concepts of control, restriction, rejection, punishment, estrangement, obedience and disobedience.
Using the complex relations of close but socially opposing concepts I embody the various forms of public and intimate forms of subordination and domination. This way, through her artistic practice, I uncover different social and political mechanisms of pressure of the bio-political imperative which is imposed on women by the heteropatriarchy, indicating how the issues of freedom and coercion are inseparable for women.
Text is written in colaboration with Dejan Vasić (2022).
1Illustration: Marina Marković, Anorexia Diary, photo: Marina Marković.2Illustration: Marina Marković, Anorexia, Before and After, 2007, photo: Marina Marković.
3Illustration: Marina Marković, Chewing and Spitting, 2011, photo: video capture.
4Illustration: Marina Marković, Pressure me, 2013, photo: video capture.
5Illustration: Marina Marković, Pressure me, 2012, photo: video capture.
6Illustration: Marina Marković Pressure me, 2012, photo: video capture
7Illustration: Marina Marković, Pressure me, 2013, photo: Sanja Latinović.
8Illustration: Marina Marković, Pressure me, 2014, photo: video capture.
9Illustration: Marina Marković, To Please, To Serve, To Obey, 2020, photo: Boris Šribar.
10Illustration: Marina Marković, It’s Not Yours to Choose 2021, photo: Boris Šribar.
11Illustration: Marina Marković, There is no reality besides corporeality, 2022, photo: Ivan Zupanc.
12Illustration: Marina Marković, Servitude 2022, photo: Ivan Zupanc.
13Illustration: Marina Marković, The Arrangement, 2021, photo: Ivan Zupanc.
14Illustration: Marina Marković, The Arrangement, 2022, X Vitamin, Belgrade, photo: Ivan Zupanc.
15Illustration: Marina Marković, The Arrangement, 2022, Contemporary Art Gallery Subotica, photo: Ivan Zupanc.
16Illustration: Marina Marković, The Arrangement, 2022, Goethe Institute, Belgrade, photo: Ivan Zupanc.
– (Beograd, 1983.) diplomirala je 2008. na Fakultetu likovnih umetnosti u Beogradu gde trenutno pohađa doktorske studije na katedri za Nove medije. Od 2006. godine redovno izlaže na samostalnim i grupnim izložbama u zemlji i inostranstvu. Boravila je na brojnim artist-in-residence programima izmedju kojih su ISCP (The International Studio & Curatorial Program) u Njujorku i Q21 – MuseumsQuartier u Beču. Dobitnica je više značajnih nagrada poput Young Visual Artist Award odnosno Dimitrije Baśićević Mangelos za 2011. godinu i Nagrade za crtež koju dodeljuje Fondacija Vladimir Veličković za 2021. godinu.
There is no reality besides corporeality since the female body is a threshold where nature and science confront culture. (Marija Ratković)
Telo i telesne prakse su centralni motiv mog umetničkog rada koji se kreće između bavljenja ličnim iskustvima i razmatranja kompleksnih društvenih pitanja postavljenih u odnosu na telo žene. Odnos prema telu u mojoj umetničkoj praksi kretao se od objektivizacije sopstvenog tela do tretmana telesnih rituala i veze između fizioloških, bioloških, psiholoških i političkih iskustava.
Iskustvo anoreksije u ranoj mladosti odredilo je pravac mog umetničkog delovanja ka politikama tela, konstrukciji i dekonstrukciji roda i seksualnosti, kao i ekonomiji želje. U radu Dnevnik anoreksije (Anorexia Diary)1 svakodnevno sam dokumentovala period početka stanja koje je započelo gladovanjem i opsednutišću hranom, do devetomesečnog lečenja anoreksije u bolnici i oporavka. U radu Anoreksija, pre i posle (Anorexia, Before and After)2 dokumentovala sam jednogodišnji „proces“ oporavka od anoreksije, telo sam tretirala kao skulpturalni materijal, dok u participativnom video performansu Chewing and Spitting3, ukazivala na spektar patoloških ponašanja vezana za konzumiranje hrane.
U sedmogodišnjem projektu Pressure me4 sam kroz različite medije (video, performans, skulptura, instalacija,itd ) pokušavala da prikažem i istražim društveni pritisak nad ženskim telom, kroz bavljenja svim bolnim ritualima svakodnevice koje žene sprovode nad sopstvenim telom u cilju postizanja/dostizanja/približavanja društveno konstruisanim idealima lepote.
Istraživanje porozne granice između slobodne volje i socijalne / biopolitičke prinude u životu žene/umetnice najviše je prikazan u video radu Void5 u kome je ultratrazvučni snimak moje prazne materice dijalektički suprotstavljen zvučnoj slici, ženskom višeglasju (glasova prabake, dveju baka, tetke, mame), koje govore o primarnim ženskim ulogama i dužnostima.
Već više od decenije na svoju kožu upisujem razne pritiske društva u vidu roze tetovaža, ne bi li ih otelovljavanjem poništila. Koža jeste polupropusna granica između sopstva i spoljnog sveta kao i idealna površina za projekciju stereotipa dok je čin tetoviranja nije samo ispisivanje tela, već je jedna od strategija preuzimanja tela nazad od društva i čin otpora.
U seriji performansa Pressure me678 mapirala sam svoje telo rozim tetovažama krojačkog metra: naime, uvezivala sam svoj struk, grudi i kukove na „idealne mere” (90-60-90), sa namerom da ih „trajno“ uhvatim i primoram da se zajedno sa mnom šire, deformišu i izobličavaju. U radovima To Please, To Serve, To Obey9, Nije tvoje da biraš10 i There is no reality beside corporeality11, Servitude12, upravo na koži preispitujem dualitete: prirodnog i voljnog, površinskog i unutrašnjeg, diskurzivnog i naznačenog.
U potencijalno celoživotnom performansu The Arrangement13141516, pozivam različite umetničke institucije / galerije sa kojima sam sarađivala da izaberu deo mog tela za tetoviranje njihovog logoa i upravo na svojoj koži preispitujem odnose moći u umetničkom svetu.
Dugogodišnje bavljenje korpo-realnim, onim što Elizabet Groš naziva „stanje telesnog postojanja” omogućilo mi je da bliže istražim pojmove zadovoljenja potreba (satisfaction), zadovoljstva (pleasure) i uživanja (jouissance) unutar života žene, koje dovodim u odnos sa kontrolom, restrikcijom, odbijanjem, kažnjavanjem, otuđivanjem, poslušnošću i neposlušnošću. Putem složenih bliskih ali društveno suprotstavljenih odnosa, otelovljujem različite forme javnih intimnih formi potčinjenosti i dominacije. Na ovaj način, u svojoj umetničkoj praksi činim vidljivim socio-političke mehanizme pritiska biopolitičkog imperativa koji je nametnut ženama od strane heteropatrijarhata, ukazujući na to da su su pitanja slobode i prinude za ženu neodvojiva.
Tekst je napisan u saradnji sa Dejanom Vasićem (2022)
1Ilustracija: Marina Marković, „Dnevnik anoreksije“, foto: Marina Marković.
