What she wears beneath, 2020

photography, art-object, installation, participatory

Today we don’t just wear underwear beneath our clothes. We carry a tapestry woven from insults. This fabric of direct and metaphorical abuse is sewn into our minds and bodies. It is varnished with the gloss of stereotype-enforcing magazines and advertisements. Just as these stereotypes tell us that the “correct” female body must be sexy, so they also give us the tools to create an image of what is “wrong”.

The problem is not the nudity itself but its extreme selectivity, which creates standards, and leads to the complexes we carry.

To be naked is to be without disguise.To be on display is to have the surface of one’s own skin, the hairs of one’s own body, turned into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress. – John Berger

What she wears beneath is real underwear on a real body made of living words and embodied insecurities. About seventy women took part in an open anonymous survey. Their confessions were calligraphically written on the artist’s body in the form of underwear. The photographs deliberately echo the aesthetic of lingerie advertising that objectifies women, creating a sharp contrast with the unattractive, offensive, and shameful quotes inscribed on the body. The project made in collaboration with Tanya Kapitinova (photography) and Valera Kaplan, Kistipero, Sveta Azonchik (calligraphy).