Open body
1.03 — 7.03 Elena Saakyan Prosecutors Dima Philipov and Katya Umnova
I remember going to the pool in high school even more remember the locker room every time I took off the top of the bathing suit wearing a T-shirt taking off the bottom of the bathing suit wearing underwear and there was no point where I would be completely naked.
The exhibit «open body» is an extension of my Studies nudity, initial state of naked body and relationship between viewer and nude. In my graduate project, I wanted to explore the locker room as a place where nudity is natural and normalized. People go there to undress. And it’s the only place around here that’s completely naked and dressed, and it’s not weird.
Open body exhibition is a re-established experience in the women’s locker room in front of the pool. The gallery has benches, lockers for things, and growth mirrors. The space is filled with the sounds of the pool. There’s a performance at the opening of the exhibit. The shapers go from shops to lockers and mirrors and change from their clothes to swimsuits and vice versa. The space is designed to prevent the viewer from being out of shape. At any point in the gallery, the audience becomes involved in the act, a man who has just entered the locker room and has not yet taken off his clothes.
The exhibition is held in winter or early spring, and viewers stand in the gallery in their upper clothes. The locker room is a place where nudity is normal and normal, but my locker room is stylish. I’m interested in an organized collision of the viewer with nudity in conditions that are friendly primarily for the character, not for the viewer. At the same time, it is an illustration of the artist’s relationship with the audience. In my work, I’m always vulnerable and my thoughts are exposed.
The main thing I wanted to focus on was experience with my own body. Both the characterist and the spectator. That’s why I wrote the exhibition from the first person, describing my experience, which I could respond to in the audience.
A lot of women around them are calmly confident and relaxed weird, but it’s like they’re all beautiful.
I remember well for one year the 50 powerful legs big breasts rhyming half-rounds of hips and shoulders strong back after soul she stood up in the middle of the locker room completely naked and started putting cream on her body looking at her and becoming embarrassed and inappropriate to herself.
I think the locker room was supposed to be a place free of shame for itself, like there’s an agreement that any body is normal any body is acceptable here a lot of bodies you don’t think about your body you don’t think the body is not embarrassed or embarrassed as if it should have been, and it hurts even more when shame suddenly discovers itself there.
There are eight lockers around the perimeter, two long shops between them, two sides of the mirror column. The viewers are allowed to sit on shops, so they can change when they sit next to the viewer. At the entrance to the gallery, there’s an exhibition text, and next to one of the lockers there are columns and a computer from which the sound is played.
Specially for the exhibition, I created a generic patch that played during the performance in the livie mode. It is made up of sewn sounds of water and drops, as well as the voices of the people in the pool.
The poster is the result of a collaboration with the artist Nastya Indiana.
It’s all about acting the way they’d be in the locker room. In addition to changing clothes, everyone has their own mini-actions, their own story: someone brushes their hair, someone wears cream, someone comes not alone, but with a friend.
The body is so vulnerable in its variability, so fragile among other bodies for the first time in a long time, you clearly feel your body undressing. New people come in their jackets. It’s weird that you’re naked and someone’s around your jacket.
The first three pens go out to the viewers in swimsuits with wet hair and caps, like after the pool. The next three come out of the crowd and change into swimsuits. Each has a few dressing exits, between which they go to the galleys, where either they wait or they pour water, mimicing the pool.
Forty-five minutes from now, we have a record of «Dear visitors, our pool closes in 15 minutes,» and the shapers gather and go into the dressing room. The end of the terminance.
Performers: Polina Chernyskov Alena Saakyan Yul Cristina Andreev Ira Agasarian Alena Lifanov Documentation: Dasha Gnatchenko and Katya Supik Separate thanks Katha and Dasha for their moral support to Mama Andrei for helping with the installation and Savwe for helping with the dismantling
