Marina Marković

My body, female body and its changes represent the central motive in my artistic practice, both subject and object, but also a bridge between intimate and public matter, private sphere and society.
Personal experience with anorexia placed my work in relation to maturing and sexuality; gender (de)construction, exploring themes of consumption and body economics as societal coercion, states of vulnerability, (in)adequacy and (de)subjectivation, maps the traumatic events by investigating personal female histories and narratives, questioning female archetypes, negotiating the body-state and gendering the gaze.
During the residency in Vienna, I would continue work on my latest project series Pressure me (2011-now). By now, I did a research through different medias (video/gif, installations, performances, sculpture, handicrafts,..) on the social pressure on women’s bodies, dealing with all the painful rituals that women carry out on daily basis, “torturing” their own bodies in order to reach/achieve/get closer to the socially constructed ideals of beauty.
The latest work from series Pressure me is The Void (15’ video loop, 2016); ultrasound recording of artist's pulsating empty uterus, dialectically opposed by the sound image of emotional preaching on women primary roles and duties. In The Void I was dealing with archaic, fatal and patriarchal notes on femininity (re)produced for the women by the women. As the motherhood is the power tool of gaining adequacy, legitimation and symbolic capital within (hetero) patriarchal private sphere, women are factually left without the choice not to be a mother.
Moving beyond the individual private sphere that the series Pressure Me – The Void deals, The Wandering Womb focuses on female body economic within the economy of the society and other public collectives. In The Wandering Womb I will try to expose and discuss practices of confronting the patriarchy as complicated, emotional, heavy and painful conflict with authorities like law and science, making distinction between “being free” and “being forced” impossible to determine and break.
The Wandering Womb, as the Vienna edition of Pressure me series is concerning a long tradition of linking female physiological and psychological states in form of societal coercions, discipline and punishment, both within the institutions and informally in private lives. This disciplining of the female body, and especially the womb is inbuilt in the very essence of the European medical, physician but also psychological and psychoanalytical practices and histories.
My research will include visits to Freud museum, The Museum of Contraception and Abortion as well as art galleries and feminist art centers dealing directly or indirectly with the subject of hysteria. The main idea is to incorporate research on “wandering womb” and “hysteria” as psychophysical state(s). The concept of hysteria is seen as a disorder of body and its corpo-reality rather then Freud’s later conceptualization of hysteria as psychological disturbance of the mind.
The Wandering Womb as a continuation of Pressure me will be conducted within framework which considers «condition of corporeal existence» (Grosz) and experiences performing femininity and body – un/conscious image. Starting from feminine Otherness, intimacy and personal space in mind, work turns to field of politics, public and art space, where the archaic visions of public (hi)stories, abandoned medical stereotypes and transgressive notions of the femininity takes place.
Furthermore, in a residency setting, I would try to extend the “female hysteria” to the concept of (un)wanted motherhood passion, seen as a form of “jouissance” (Julia Kristeva, Jacqueline Rose), in which the woman could use the male dominance of the field of “reason” to assert her intuition into the irrational and mystical sexual and political (power seeking) transgression.
Powerful cacophony of natural, scientific arguments would designate video work, neutral scientific body of evidence is being politicized the way science is constantly (ab)used by heteropatriachy. Objective, neutral and normal are always attributes attached to dominant politics, in order to normalize it and to assign any irregularity as deviant, anomaly and abnormal, ready to be eliminate. Within The Wandering Womb, politics is directly derived from the female body economy, and complex system of coersions and freedom, both in public and private sphere.
During the residence in Vienna, my main intention is to expose (once) dominant scientific bio-politics and its history as counter-objective. Within the research, I will analyze and deconstruct the very concept of reason as one of the pillars of male dominance, present in all segments of public sphere. The idea besides the Wandering Womb is that there is no reality besides the corpo-reality, since female body, is a a threshold where nature and science confront culture and politics (Kristeva).