DIVA Station in collaboration with Red Dawns
Nataša Skušek: A Real Man
Videoinstallation and artist talk

Thursday, March 7, 2013, at 8pm
SCCA Project Room, Metelkova 6, Ljubljana
Videoinstallation will be on view: Friday, March 8, 10am-5pm

SCCA-Ljubljana regularly collaborates with the International Feminist and Queer Festival Red Dawns. Within the 14th edition we participate at the project by Nataša Skušek.

Nataša Skušek is a visual artist who, apart from video, uses various other medias of expression such as performance, sculpture, drawing, or photography in order to deal with the topic of social relations of women in contemporary world. The collection of her videos is being kept in Digital video archive Diva Station at SCCA-Ljubljana.

LECTURE (In Slovene. Translation to English available on demand.)
In her lecture, she is going to focus on artistic works (videos, photography) touching upon feminist topics. We also cannot bypass her exhibition, entitled 'Mamica, dojilja, žena, negovalka' ('Mother, breastfeeder, wife, carer') (Center in Galerija P74, 2006), in which she thematizes women’s incapability of fulfilling numerous social roles ascribed to them. In the context of this exhibition, she screened the video 'Fliperautomat', which is a humorous way of the representation of four activities considered to be taken on by women in a taken-for-granted way. In this video, a woman is a ball in the pinball machine, jumping between the roles of a mother, wife, breastfeeder and carer. Her artistic work is strongly related to her own life – in it, she also warns against the disappearance of the female artist.

In her work 'Ekstaza' ('Extasis'), she exposes the myth of a wonderful motherhood and emphasizes the mother’s self-effacement. Whereas in the popular media breastfeeding is represented as a gentle act, her video shows the artist herself making painful facial expressions in the act of breastfeeding. Her message is that babies being breastfed are not gentle beings and that breastfeeding mothers often suffer from the inflammation of the breast tissue.

In her screenings entitled 'Lebdenje' ('Floating') and 'Toaleta' ('Fancy dress'), Nataša Skušek focuses on women and relaxation, pointing to the fact that women’s relaxation time is being more and more pushed into the area of the private. As women are being expelled from  the public space, their only refuge has become the bathroom. The bathroom in Skušek’s work becomes a woman’s temple of healing and rest, where she removes herself from the rest of the world, which expects from her to be a perfect mother, housewife, and a sexi career woman. The female body in this work is projected from the wall onto the bathtub, where the woman rests and heals her daily wounds.

In 2002 and 2003, Nataša Skušek cooperated with Duba Sambolec on two video performances: Nohomevideos© Collectors #3 Settings and Nohomevideos© Collectors #4 Revisited.

VIDEOINSTALLATION
After the lecture, the audience will have an opportunity to have a quick look at her exhibition 'Pravi moški' ('Real man') in Galerija Alkatraz in 2014. Video installation with two videos, 'Golica' and 'Heri', set one opposite to the other, is a caricature of the contrast of male and female roles in the society. Golica is one of the songs belonging to the genre of national music; in the video, the artist dances to this song. In front of her is a female torso, moving her butt according to the male viewer’s whistling rhythm. The video Heri shows the process of making a braid out of a male ear. Its message is that women were supposed to be pleasing men, while men are the ones who were supposed to be nurtured and accepted the way they are. The exhibition in Galerija Alkatraz (Alkatraz Gallery) tackles socially prescribed outlook and behaviour of men, their feelings, and their perceptions of their female partners. With an example, it shows what a real man actually looks like, and how far (luckily) he is from the perfect image ascribed to him.

Nataša Skušek, Heri, video

SURPRISE
The artist also holds a bitter-sweet surprise for the exhibition opening – fortune cookies with notes foreseeing, not the future, but the present, including chauvinistic sayings, being angrily collected by the artist for years.

Nataša Skušek (1967, Ljubljana) holds a BA and an MA from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Ljubljana. In 2000, she was awarded with Prešernova nagrada. She has been collaborating at various exhibitions at home and abroad since 1999 — including the international festival Break 2.2 Invisible Threat at Ljubljana’s castle (2003), in Galerija P74 with her exhibition 'Mother, breastfeeder, wife, carer' (2006) (joining photography, video, objects, and sound), at City of Women festival with an installation 'Light blue and pink' in a supermarket Nama (2007), at the Bienale of women’s art in Incheon, South Corea (2009), at the exhibition 'Feminist art in Slovenia' (2010), at the European exhibition 'Cologne OFF 2011', 'Pain with the Thousand Teeth' (2011), etc. Her light blackboard has been exhibited in Klub Tiffany, AKC Metelkova Mesto, since 2011. She also won the third place at the 13th haiku competition 'Timelessness of cherry flowers', organized by a literary magazine 'Apokalipsa', Ljubljana.

Production of 14th edition of the festival Red Dawns: KUD Mreža
Co-production: SCCA, Center for Contemporary Arts – Ljubljana

[Published February 28, 2013]