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June 20th – July 6th
The exhibition Fool Me Once, Shame On You. Fool Me Twice, Shame on Me. explores the discrepancies between intimate and public anticipations and anxiety, while offering a playful outset of the artist’s own perception of what and how it is to carry a load of social expectations. The exhibition is compiled of two different video and site-specific installations; Anxiety Machine, in which the artist explores the emotional strata of social norms through the ‘anxiety tool’, undergoing ritualized tension release exercise, and consequently reaching catharsis. Belly Love is the second performative piece, in which endurance plays a key role in showcasing the limits, weights, and violence of social conditioning. Both of these works relate to one another and hold strong performative aspects that question socio-cultural convictions of our contemporary conditions.
This exhibition investigates the trajectories between body representation, social gender-performativity, and identificational power-plays of the contemporary environment. The showcased works look into ramifications and disorientating factors relating to gender and body expectations of a contemporary and highly demanding socio-cultural environment. The artist’s identity struggles are visible in the performative endurance in which she invites spectators to witness the inflicting vicious trials of social expectations and cultural pressure. The burden of enduring the continuous reconstruction of the identity as a form of ‘purification ritual’ stimulates the already distorted identificational prospect of modern subjects.
Text and title: Andrea Knezović
Photo: Nemanja Knežević, N. Ivanović