The installation comprises photographs of a woman’s body and several common office tools – a stapler, a pair of scissors, a punch, etc. The form of the photographs has been disturbed with physical stimuli, like piercing the paper, burning or sewing it with a thread. It is not a real body, but its photographic representation that undergoes tortures in the project. However, the stimuli that act on the (photographed) body are authentic and painful, indeed. Piercing, injuring and cutting the photographs serve as a simulation for real “pain test” - a deliberate act of inflicting physical suffering.
Torturing a representation of a human body brings to mind voodoo rituals, mostly associated with piercing a doll, thus imposing diseases, misfortunes or death upon the victim. Nevertheless, what do tormented photographs of a half-naked woman found in a flat of an average contemporary western man mean? What is the purpose of inflicting such sophisticated violence upon the photographed body? What is the perpetrator of the paper crime guided by – erotic fantasies, vengeance or blood craving? One thing is beyond doubt – in such an organized, perfectly arranged space even crime is aesthetic and torture instruments have modern, office like character.
Ewa Doroszenko: Simulated Tortures
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