Between mid-October and mid-November, the Mobius Gallery in Bucharest,
\none of the most important places in the city that bring contemporary art closer
\nto the public, is hosting an exhibition by Ileana Pa\u0219cal\u0103u, entitled Shaving
\nthe Caterpillar. The artist was born in Caransebe\u0219 (western Romania), and she is now living and working in Berlin. Ileana Pa\u0219cal\u0103u is a visual artist and an
\nart historian, and her current exhibition brings together art and the
\ntheoretical investigation of the history of the human body, particularly the
\nfemale body:<\/p>\n
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Ileana Pa\u0219cal\u0103u: Shaving the Caterpillar is the name of the exhibition I put
\ntogether jointly with the curator Valentina Iancu, at the invitation of Mobius
\nGallery. The exhibition is designed as a journey into the history of the female
\nbody, from a medical perpective. The project is based on a broader research
\neffort that I embarked upon in 2017, when I was looking for a topic for my
\nPh.D. thesis. So it all started from a theoretical investigation that spanned
\nseveral years and focused on the anatomy of women as seen by physicians, mainly
\nmen, between the 17th and the 19th Centuries. I would
\nalso like to emphasise the importance of my family background in the
\ndevelopment of these ideas. I grew up in a family in which my mother, an
\ninternist, used to give me all sorts of medical instruments and accessories to
\nplay with, instead of toys. My grandmothers, who were OB-GYN nurses, somehow
\nkindled my interest in the female anatomy and this curiosity of looking at it
\nfrom an artistic perspective as well.<\/p>\n
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Ileana Pa\u0219cal\u0103u also went on to tell us about her creative process, and
\nabout the questions she set out to answer or to encourage the public to ask when
\nvisiting the exhibition:<\/p>\n
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Ileana Pa\u0219cal\u0103u: My works shed light on stories that are rather painful. My
\ncreative process is based on signifying the often shocking or distressing
\ninformation discovered during the research, information which may be once again
\ntraumatising for the public if it were displayed as such. But far from being a
\nscientific, medical, psychiatric type of research, mine is an artistic research
\ninto the history of this topic, and is not intended as a comprehensive investigation.
\nRather, I would hope the visitors’ experience to be similar to touching a large
\nscar. In other words, I would like people to be encouraged to ask questions and
\nto seek answers: what happened, along the centuries, with the construction of
\nthe female anatomy by male physicians? How painful have those medical theories
\nbeen for women? What were the consequences of these theories? Is this scar
\nhealed? What is left of it today? Even this common saying about a woman being
\nhysterical is a 19th Century fiction. So when using this word
\nagain, we should keep in mind that this concept was an instrument of
\nmanipulation and torture. And not least, I would like visitors to ask
\nthemselves, how do we avoid this kind of injuries and scars, what do we learn
\nfrom them, how do we become stronger?<\/p>\n
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At the end of our discussion, Ileana Pa\u0219cal\u0103u told us about the
\nmaterials used in her works, and the route she created for the exhibition
\nvisitors:<\/p>\n
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Ileana Pa\u0219cal\u0103u: A first narrative in the exhibition
\nfocuses on the question, How was the second sex born? And in a first stage of
\nthe exhibition, we have drawings that suggest the medical writings and
\nillustrations in 17th and 18th Century scientific
\ntreatises. These drawings outline a history of the female anatomy, marked by
\nphysicians’ obsessions with the female reproductive system. So the exhibition
\nviewing direction is first designed to show how physicians constructed the
\nfemale anatomic image starting from the uterus, which was seen as the main
\nmarker of the differences between the two sexes. But more than a marker, the
\nuterus was seen as an unpredictable, dangerous organ, able to cause insanity
\nand major behavioural deviations. In a second stage, the exhibition looks at
\nthe Enlightenment, the period that brought us the first image of a female
\nskeleton. This is when the second sex also gets its own spine and thorax. It is
\nan important moment, which I illustrated with installations made of artificial
\nskin and metal. Leather, skin, with its organic connotations, is a material
\nwith which I worked specifically for this exhibition, I cut, pierced and glued
\ntogether layers of skin, just like a surgeon. Hence this parallel I had in mind
\nthroughout my artistic effort, that the artist works in similar ways as a
\ndoctor. And finally, the climax of the exhibition is the concept of hysteria,
\nwhich is a construct, a fiction. If there is anything I would love the public
\nto take home from this exhibition, this would be it: people should stop using
\nthe word hysteria altogether. (AMP)<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An exhibition by Ileana Pa\u0219cal\u0103u at Mobius Gallery in Bucharest<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":164007,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44685],"tags":[45153,33514,45152,43298,32349,45151,43235],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-164006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-of-culture","tag-anatomy","tag-art","tag-body","tag-contemporary","tag-exhibition","tag-female","tag-installations"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n