Premamai
Elena Ketra, Eolo Perfido
Curated by Uros Gorgone
From 18th December 2023, Project Space, Venice
542-544 Campo Rialto Novo, 30125 VE
Wednesday - Saturday 4pm - 7:30pm admission free
Photography and Video exhibition by Elena Ketra e Eolo Perfido. Curated by Uros Gorgone, the project explores the construction of social roles in relation to womanhood and motherhood. Read the feature on Exibart.
Curatorial Notes
The project investigates the relationship between women and motherhood, which often ceases to be a choice and becomes an institutional and social obligation. In the series of photographs and videos that visually represent the concept of the exhibition, Elena forcibly wears a silicone belly (usually used by actresses to simulate pregnancy), becoming a metaphor for struggles faced by women, in order to establish ownership over their own bodies. Premamai speaks of the maternal feminine, highlighting at once beauty and anxiety, anguish and tension. In fact, the emotional spectrum of Elena Ketra and Eolo Perfido's project is vast. There are rarefied images, where only the tension of the skin and the geometry of the shot are visible. Inside Premamai there is, above all, what is unspoken, that which is still taboo, still hidden. Among the wonders of motherhood, there is an underworld filled with discouragement, anger, loneliness and pain. Political oppression, social expectations, rigid traditions that hinder the freedom for women to choose another life, another path.
Underlying this tension around the theme of motherhood is always the need for a reaction. Here, this is embodied in a video featuring rapid and cathartic images, at times lysergic: a representation of an awareness, the right to be able to scream after having long harboured an anger arising inside a woman's womb.
Certainly, this project does not intend in any way to oppose to the importance of motherhood. Instead, it is meant to be a cry of pain and anger that arises every time a woman is forced to become a social "fabrica", before being considered a human being.
Fabrica
Marta Czok
Curated by Jacek Ludwig Scarso
Curatorial Notes
For the duration of the exhibition Premamai, Jacek Ludwig Scarso curates a selection of paintings from the Marta Czok Permanent Collection to accompany the themes explored.
Female figures in Marta Czok's work have always intrigued the public: from work scenes to leisure scenes, from the sobriety of bourgeois and aristocratic worlds, to the continuous activity of kitchens and factories. The works chosen for our current selection playfully refer to the history of art: here we find the conventions of Baroque and Rococo portraits reinterpreted – women, in the formality of a haughty posture, exhibit extravagant hair (birds, objects, etc.), almost like mythological figures. Each character looks at the viewer from the side, holding a jewel in her hand as if to symbolize the eye of the observer themself.
Three works on pregnant women complement this collection, including the one that bears the title of this collection: Fabrica. Here pregnancy is portrayed with ambiguity - a liminal moment of expectation but also of social pressures. The Latin word "Fabrica" makes us think of the pressures on the role of women as procreators, but also of the concept of cultural fabrication, through which gender roles are constructed and maintained according to ideological criteria that appear "natural" to us.
