This short film displays Valery Export's views on women in society. She uncovers the socially hidden suffering and pain women experience in life. Through her shocking imagery and semiotic use of the body, she attempts to free the woman's image from the confides of society and men.
With sometimes painful directness, she conducts a psychological investigation of the body in this film performance, externalizes an internal state. In front of a police photo showing two children, she tortuously cuts into her cuticles until blood drips into a bowl of milk on her lap. On top of the symbolic plane of blood and milk, the physical effect on the viewer of her destructive act of self-mutilation is extreme.
Valie Export forces you into the male position of watching pain: alienating, repulsing and terrorizing you with it.
A female's image is very much connected to her identity, especially by society. Like many of Export's performance pieces, she is again freeing her body from society, by having the woman cut away at her own hands. A woman's hands are stereotypically associated with well-groomed polished nails, and fragile feminine fingers.
With sometimes painful directness, she conducts a psychological investigation of the body in this film performance, externalizes an internal state. In front of a police photo showing two children, she tortuously cuts into her cuticles until blood drips into a bowl of milk on her lap. On top of the symbolic plane of blood and milk, the physical effect on the viewer of her destructive act of self-mutilation is extreme.
Valie Export forces you into the male position of watching pain: alienating, repulsing and terrorizing you with it.
A female's image is very much connected to her identity, especially by society. Like many of Export's performance pieces, she is again freeing her body from society, by having the woman cut away at her own hands. A woman's hands are stereotypically associated with well-groomed polished nails, and fragile feminine fingers.
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