Oral Fixation

2022
performance in collaboration with Alma Gačanin

By engaging with themes of sexuality, womanhood, and work, and through explicit performative femininity and the use of popular culture motifs, the works of Alma Gačanin and Anastasija Pavić challenge and provoke the social consensuses upon which these topics are upheld. The highly performative female subjects are pushed to their extremes as a means of reconsidering their own understanding of being produced through male desire. Within the current context of homogenizing economic and socio-political structures, the artists seek to reposition their own hybrid socio-technological bodies. The materialized vision brings together multiple tropes of contemporary female subjectivity—the vengeful woman, lover, labourer, artist, and feminist. In an age that insists on consistency within individualism, woman emerges as a hybrid construction encompassing all of her possible forms. By blurring the lines between “Jackie” and “Marilyn,” it becomes evident that each woman embodies both, forming a balanced yet fetishized and sexualized cyborg figure. Through strategies of subversive affirmation, namely, the overemphasized identification with the ideologies and regimes under critique, combined with irony and parody, the artists establish a shared modus operandi of feminist action. From this position, the work moves beyond purely discursive platforms for dialogue around feminist issues, instead proposing possible prototypes: desired models of solidaristic feminist artistic and curatorial engagement. - Maja Petrović, art historian and curator