"Shaving the Caterpillar"

"shaving the caterpillar" An exhibition by Ileana Pașcalău at Mobius Gallery in Bucharest

Between mid-October and mid-November, the Mobius Gallery in Bucharest, one of the most important places in the city that bring contemporary art closer to the public, is hosting an exhibition by Ileana Pașcalău, entitled "Shaving the Caterpillar." The artist was born in Caransebeș (western Romania), and she is now living and working in Berlin. Ileana Pașcalău is a visual artist and an art historian, and her current exhibition brings together art and the theoretical investigation of the history of the human body, particularly the female body:


Ileana Pașcalău: "Shaving the Caterpillar" is the name of the exhibition I put together jointly with the curator Valentina Iancu, at the invitation of Mobius Gallery. The exhibition is designed as a journey into the history of the female body, from a medical perpective. The project is based on a broader research effort that I embarked upon in 2017, when I was looking for a topic for my Ph.D. thesis. So it all started from a theoretical investigation that spanned several years and focused on the anatomy of women as seen by physicians, mainly men, between the 17th and the 19th Centuries. I would also like to emphasise the importance of my family background in the development of these ideas. I grew up in a family in which my mother, an internist, used to give me all sorts of medical instruments and accessories to play with, instead of toys. My grandmothers, who were OB-GYN nurses, somehow kindled my interest in the female anatomy and this curiosity of looking at it from an artistic perspective as well."


Ileana Pașcalău also went on to tell us about her creative process, and about the questions she set out to answer or to encourage the public to ask when visiting the exhibition:


Ileana Pașcalău: "My works shed light on stories that are rather painful. My creative process is based on signifying the often shocking or distressing information discovered during the research, information which may be once again traumatising for the public if it were displayed as such. But far from being a scientific, medical, psychiatric type of research, mine is an artistic research into the history of this topic, and is not intended as a comprehensive investigation. Rather, I would hope the visitors' experience to be similar to touching a large scar. In other words, I would like people to be encouraged to ask questions and to seek answers: what happened, along the centuries, with the construction of the female anatomy by male physicians? How painful have those medical theories been for women? What were the consequences of these theories? Is this scar healed? What is left of it today? Even this common saying about a woman being "hysterical" is a 19th Century fiction. So when using this word again, we should keep in mind that this concept was an instrument of manipulation and torture. And not least, I would like visitors to ask themselves, how do we avoid this kind of injuries and scars, what do we learn from them, how do we become stronger?"


At the end of our discussion, Ileana Pașcalău told us about the materials used in her works, and the route she created for the exhibition visitors:


Ileana Pașcalău: "A first narrative in the exhibition focuses on the question, "How was the second sex born?" And in a first stage of the exhibition, we have drawings that suggest the medical writings and illustrations in 17th and 18th Century scientific treatises. These drawings outline a history of the female anatomy, marked by physicians' obsessions with the female reproductive system. So the exhibition viewing direction is first designed to show how physicians constructed the female anatomic image starting from the uterus, which was seen as the main marker of the differences between the two sexes. But more than a marker, the uterus was seen as an unpredictable, dangerous organ, able to cause insanity and major behavioural deviations. In a second stage, the exhibition looks at the Enlightenment, the period that brought us the first image of a female skeleton. This is when the second sex also gets its own spine and thorax. It is an important moment, which I illustrated with installations made of artificial skin and metal. Leather, skin, with its organic connotations, is a material with which I worked specifically for this exhibition, I cut, pierced and glued together layers of skin, just like a surgeon. Hence this parallel I had in mind throughout my artistic effort, that the artist works in similar ways as a doctor. And finally, the climax of the exhibition is the concept of "hysteria," which is a construct, a fiction. If there is anything I would love the public to take home from this exhibition, this would be it: people should stop using the word "hysteria" altogether." (AMP)



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Publicat: 2022-11-05 13:09:00
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