Today we open one of our last programme spaces: the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon (FBAUL). Until the 19th of December, the Gallery will host Discernible Beauty, an exhibition by Belgian artist Sam Asaert. Meanwhile, the Cisterna will be showing a looped collection of videodance by several artists.
Discernible Beauty is a photographic dialogue that juxtaposes central notions of Western performing arts and capitalist visual communication, playing with the role that the female physique plays in both.
Created over a period of several years, this project was realised through a collaborative process that began with a sequence of conversations with dancers from various international ballet companies. With these conversations, Asaert sought to understand the ways in which dancers have perceived their bodies, and themselves as a whole, throughout their lives, and, based on these perceptions, to portray the flaws that the artists identify in their bodies and within them. Whether because of body image culture and the professional struggle for unattainable physical perfection, negative and derogatory comments made during their formative years, the inability to fulfil the artistic physical demands of choreographers and company directors, or injuries suffered throughout their careers, all these dancers identify parts of themselves that they hide, mask, suppress or neglect.
Each image in this series corresponds to a statement made by a dancer during the initial conversations with the photographer:
“I really hate my feet”; “I don’t like my body”; “They keep telling me my calves are too weak”; “Only my right leg is good enough”; “My ballet teacher told me I would never find work because of my long neck”; “Every time I rehearse in front of the mirror I just want to sink into the floor”; “My left foot is terrible”; “They always say my hips are too wide”; “Ever since the surgery I hate my knee"…
Drawing on the visual language of religious iconography, classical Western painting, expressionism and 20th century capitalist advertising, and using commercial product photography techniques that emphasise choreographic lines, balletic limbs and bodily beauty, Discernible Beauty is a project that aims to represent the physical and psychological cost of conforming to the aesthetic demands imposed (predominantly, though not exclusively) on women.
While the visual language that predominates in Western culture combines bodily beauty with the emotional tonality of sexual availability and desire, the bodies exhibited in this series combine athletic bodily prowess with a body language that reveals a deeply hidden fragility and inner turmoil.
Juxtaposition is therefore central to this photographic corpus: juxtaposition of perception and self-perception, showing and hiding, seeing and being seen. Choreographic prowess based on physical strength is juxtaposed with the body language of psychological fragility and inner turmoil. Colour, with its historical application to enhance the beauty of the body, is juxtaposed with fabric, with its historical religious application to hide the beauty of the body.
In short, Discernible Beauty is a photography series that attempts to visualize dancers’ inner world as a result of the (self-)perceived shortcomings, which these professional dancers wish to remain hidden and unseen yet which their profession requires them to put on display.
At Cisterna of FBAUL, videodance emerges as a platform for expanding choreographic horizons, in a collection of 14 films that challenge the limits of time and space.
Therefore, InShadow brings the projects to this space:
O Colon, by Welket Bungué (BR) 4’
ÁNIMA, by Isaac Zambra Isaac (MX) 14’
Cats. Why do we need them?, by Liudmila Komrakova (RU) 9’
Sentence, by Rosemary Lee and Hugo Glendinning (UK) 9’
mom, by Leonardo Modonutto (IT) 7’
re:birth, by Laticia Fan (TW) 8’
Trois Motets, by Elliot James Storey (FR) 15’
Osmose, by Eva Motreff (FR) 5’
Sea beats, by Macarena Guarachi (CL) 17’
Saint-Rémi, by Simon Vermeulen (CA) 4’
MY HANDS ARE NOT MINE TO KEEP, by Guilherme Daniel (PT) 8’
June of LingBei, by Qu Youxiang (CN) 5’
The people are missing, by Pau Pericas and Georgia Vardarou (ES) 8’
Landing On Tarmac, by Anuschka von Oppen and Marco Rios Bollinger (DE) 7’
Consult the cistern timetables here.
Visit FBAUL and let yourself be fascinated by all the artistic proposals we have to offer!