Multi-disciplinary artist Nadja Verana Marcin‘s arresting image first appeared in her recent solo exhibition Cinema Pirata – How To Undress in Front of Your Husband, alongside the artist’s film How to Undress In Front Of Your Husband. The exhibition—covered by VICE Magazine in A Sexist 1960s Film Remake Rewrites Cinema History—considered the permitted roles and power dynamics in the production of mass media and film.
Designed in collaboration with the architectural designer Terrence Schroeder, and housed within the confines of an historic feminist art space, the show also comprised Distribution Vehicle, in which Marcin’s video works were screened inside the backseat of a station wagon—popping up around the neighborhood during Bushwick Open Studios—as a nod to Kunstraum’s bootleg video store (of which Marcin is also a founder). The jerry-rigged nature of the screening room was Marcin’s humorously dark reference to the challenges that female filmmakers often face regarding the distribution of their work. As a gesture releasing the works from their potential patriarchal and capitalist constraints, nothing was exploited, sold, or purchased. Passers-by could only be spectators of the pieces.
Often deflating the gendered hierarchies embedded within the film industry, much of Marcin’s work reflects on the roots of our cultural behaviors, in an attempt to shift the roles and voices of the media that we currently consume.
“At the core, I aim to express that the full world of gender and the breadth of its expression has the potential to exist within one person, and that person is also the almighty oppressor or oppressed—depending on how we want to see it. Just as authentic cinema comes from within a culture and not from outside, a genuine challenge to the patriarchal system needs to emerge also from the margins.”
Cinema Pirata, will be on view at Jaeckel Gallery in New York, presented in the exhibition Winter Salon. An opening reception will be held Saturday, February 4, 4-6pm, at which the artist will be present.
DATES
February 4 – March 4, 2017
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 4, 4-6pm
LOCATION
Jaeckel Gallery
532 W. 25th Street
New York, NY 10001
One response to “How To Undress In Front of Your Husband”
Challenges of female film-makers, women’s rights…. this couldn’t be more timely.