Alexandra Gabunia.“Feminine Fantasies”

Alexandra Gabunia. 2005

N Gallery. Exhibition "Feminine Fantasies"

Contemporary art in Georgia applies to western funds oriented to the east European countries to maintain itself. Only when the funding program ideology admits difference, diversity and it complies with the project team conceptual, emotional abstracting, it is possible to create own critical and emotional relations with outer world and society

Mama Cash is the organization for women striving for a peacefull and just world. It supports women's groups with self-initiated projects. On this background a question appears against “the feminine fantasies” – what is the role of modern Georgian art images in construction of gender identity? The indicator of answer appears to be representation of cultural, sociological and anthropologic sensations of feminine group coming from private and historical routs. So-called “Gender display” that has fixed efforts of life contemplation and artistic disobedience.

When you put your soul in the elegy “Beyond the veil” and give deeper meaning to everyday life images or place your sense in photographic images turned to ”Nijio’s” intellectual and physical partners and want to comprehend their physical or sensual source, or when you reveal balanced and ironical “New collection” with colored accents, you try to deconstruct cultural rubber stamps and stereotypes, steal disharmonious images from the existence rhythm and introduce gender relations in the given social reality fragment.

In this fragment the artists are not voyeurs and all is on them: «transformation» of still life of old underclothes and accessories (bodice, stockings, buttons, swimsuits) is a nervous energy of genetical origin; declaration of prisoner women’s “guilt” is a private anonymous archetype; quoting of fly with “the beautiful dress” is interpreted according to own aesthetic and existential expressions or ironical analysis of a woman’s perfect body cult that should be “appreciated”, when ideological-colorful provocation takes place and afterwards comprehension with video image nature. These are visual assumptions of search of identity.

This is some performance too, where “a woman of 1, 64 cm” visualizes forcibly her intimate life on her body – smears her face with a lipstick, pull outs eyebrows with pincers and lets spectators into the mirror of her own feelings.

Marking a woman’s body with soft-tip pen reincarnates in different metaphorical images to forget that it happens on a woman’s body and that other corporal and perceptible functions may exist here, in this geographic point.

This is important.