WE COME WITH A BOW
Šejla Kamerić
The upcoming solo presentation of Šejla Kamerić’s work in Skopje looks at the age-long portrayal of women as witches and/or objects. Alluding to the well-known thematic concerns of radical feminism, socialist feminism and post-structuralist views, the exhibition also aims to bring the common, domestic and familiar everyday elements to light and to underscore the issues to which we don’t usually pay enough attention. This intention is set carefully within the new alteration of the show’s centrepiece, “We come with a bow”, which shows an unusually long, thin red fabric that begins as a typical women’s bow-styled underwear decoration and ends up tangling the audience in its own materiality. This gesture – the exaggerated lengthening of the bow, the intentional displacement of the bow to match where the clitoris should be – plays with the idea of an object that is no longer an object at all, but it has its own life, its own agency and power.
The metaphorical value contained in this piece exists in many of the others, in various ways. Many of the works remind us of household objects and typically “womanly” routines: knitting, weaving, working around the garden; being a mother; or even “being” a gift, a present to someone (hence, coming with a bow). Šejla Kamerić uses these processes and states to explore and question the (de)construction of gender, identity, intimacy, and sexuality, as well as the social, political, and economic subordination of women and their representations within the patriarchal societies and neoliberal capitalism. In that sense, the word bow, with this same spelling, could potentially be misread and pronounced differently: in this case referring to bending, a show of surrender, submission, acceptance, also commonly seen before or after a performance. To read the word differently and view it in this connotation also connects to how women exist in the societies we’ve known so far.
The exhibition will include body of work transferred from her latest solo show in Belgrade, “Mother is a bitch”, other photographic pieces (“Embarazada” and “Unknown”) as well as works from the series “Hooked”, “Missing” and “Digital Nudes”. It will also feature a new work, “Rose garden” which will continue the exploration of the formal line already shown in “Hooked”, while taking the containment of the female body in a different direction. The crocheted flowers, or more precisely roses, (flowers filled with the symbolic meaning of love, power, beauty, sensuality, mysticism, and sacrifice) immediately bring to mind Hortus conclusus, a motif from Christian iconography, popular during the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. As Liz Herbert McAvoy of Swansea Univerity argues: “The ‘to protect the women from sin’ idea is disingenuous, although ubiquitous. In most cultures, female sexuality is seen as dangerous to men. By locking them up, they ‘contain’ that threat, whilst at the same time masquerading as protecting women from men”.
The show is curated by Natalija Paunić and is part of KRIK festival for critical culture and Tiiiit Inc. It opens at the National Gallery of North Macedonia’s Cifte Hammam in Skopje on September 28th and it will be on view until October 23rd.