Focus on: Marina Marković

Art, like a stomach of desire, swallows, digests, produces objects. Marina Marković is the artist who explores the personal and social aspects of dietary ideologies. In her previous work, the artist used her own body to document the process of anorexia, where, in her own words, she treated the body as a “sculptural material.” Marina Markovic’s personal experience of anorexia places her work in a constant relationship with maturation and sexuality; themes of consumerism and postmodern society.

In her latest work, including the video performance “Chewing and Spitting”, the artist explores pathological behaviors related to food. Marina links this phenomenon to the global consumer society that insists on hedonism and the satisfaction of consumer needs (for food and other products), while imposing a media conception of the “ideal body”. This approach implies that the social construction of femininity brings the girl to identify with the social role that conveys a dependent, weak, submissive and sexualized image of women. Marina makes us aware of how our body interacts with the world, allowing us to become aware of social oppressions and the need for a reappropriation of our body and your self-image.

“Pressure me” is a performance during which Marina Markovic is tattooed around the waist with a sewing tape fixed on an ideal 60cm. This work associates the body of women with its norm imposed from the outside and pushes it to the limits of the pressure.

Images created from television commercials show women delighted about products such as laundry detergents, shampoos, sanitary napkins, washing liquids.

In this work, the body and its modifications represent the medium and the very object of art. Recent work has shifted from bodily practices to the treatment of objects, questioning consumption and the processes of personal de-subjectivation through consumption.

In Marina’s previous work, the body and its modifications represent the medium and the very object of art.

Thus, Art refers to life itself, to pure activity. The artistic couple Marina Marković and Boris Šribar used an art gallery as a temporary place of residence. They evoked the media and manipulative strategies of forms such as reality shows: by moving these strategies into the artistic context, they indicated global contamination. Marina Marković and Boris Šribar referred to Occupy Wall Street movement or the increasingly important student protests – a temporary stay in and within a certain space becoming a political gesture.

Winston Churchill said, “Criticism can be unpleasant, but it is necessary, it is like pain for the human body: it draws attention to what is wrong”

Text by Séverine Grosjean  / www.thenomadcreativeprojects.com / Instagram: @nomad_creative_projects / @Facebook

Contact:

marinamarkovic.com
Instagram: @holylollipop
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