Maria Gorodeckaya‘s solo exhibition Pulling Flesh from the Shell with an Index was on at Vienna’s Kevin Space, opening on September 30 and running to October 30, 2016.
Curated by Franziska Sophie Wildförster, the site-specific performative sculptural installation explored the “dynamics and representations of power structures determining female identity, sex and desire through the affective and affected body.” Here, the skin acts as a point of conflict – a struggle and a border – that’s written upon and lying “open for re-inscription, marking the most intimate and most public threshold – worked, produced and narrated by political, social, ideological forces.”
Left with the traces and remnants of movement, the actions of a body re-enacting and re-inscribing its asserted roles in sex and desire materialise in a circle of Shea Butter stepped over with high heels, metal poles covered in glitter and dragon tattoos, and plastic jewellery flanked by walls of white paint scraped off with steam.
The show comes accompanied by the following poem by the artist:
“warm moisture dripped from my body to yours
the closest i got to another person, my internal organs felt you,
like as if you were ripping my stomach out
the impossibility as well as necessity to have, try get, be under your french skin
to break the seal and have your sweat coming down my forehead
have my hair mix with your hair, have your dirt under my fingernails
have your anxiety, uneasiness and crossed eyes
to be the distorted flesh,
and smell this otherness under the very tip of my nose
every day”**
