SULK INSTALLATION, ON VIEW AT CENTRE GEORGES POMPIDOU, PARIS (FR)

15 JUNE - 2 JULY 2023

Dedicated mainly to female creation, the Move 2023 festival titled Marvellous Demons takes as its starting point the 19th century figure of the “hysteric”, which author Hélène Cixous described as a “wondrous demon”. She appears as a force of resistance, underscoring the power of creation and revealing the rejection of categorisations, the loss of control, the unfore- seeable as a potential space to explore. For Move, the duo of artists presents an installation SULK evoking the deconstructed space of a boudoir. The works evoke this space that confined bodies historically, the space of the boudoir restraining forbidden and repressed sexuality, but was also a place of intimate expression and solitary reflection. The installation proposes to engage with the idea of a double corporality – that of the physical body, and another more diffuse and spatially and temporally fragmented corporality. Dorota Gaweda and Egle Kulbokaite are inspired in their work by feminist theoretical and fictional writings. Their installation evokes a boudoir, a symbol of the enclosed, secret and withdrawn space of female intimacy, which they have deconstructed and reconfigured as a place marked by fantasies concerning female sexuality. The work is influenced by feminist theory and fiction, horror films, Eastern European folklore, Baltic and Slav oral traditions of rituals and incantations in a world in which there is no division between time and species, humans and non-humans, living and dead beings.

The folding screens retain the memory of a past performance presented in Athens, which preserves a fleeting and ghostlike memory of the bodies presented. Traces of this performance are also found in the scent diffused in the space by the mysterious and austere metal diffuser, Censer I. RYXPER1126AE is a synthetic recreation using a technology that captures the molecules (headspace) of the scent of the bodies and of the performance by attempting to transmit its sensual experience. It contains various ingredients, including medicinal plants used by women for their curative virtues and as natural contraceptives, reminding us of the importance of women’s ancestral knowledge of plants and care spaces.