Dr. Svetlana Racanović, Art Historian and Art Critic

The deobjectification and emancipation of the female body and the establishment of the female subject in our art and culture, as a product of the social repositioning of women’s identity outside of the Montenegrin patriarchal cultural matrix, are also exposed through the active artistic engagement of Montenegrin artists, whether they have participated confidently in the creation of the contemporary art scene or, through that engagement, articulated and self-questioned a distinctive female subjectivity. Thus, traditional gender ideologies and social practices have been subverted and engaged, and the transgressing of artistic activity has been encouraged. Explicit and exemplary in this sense is the work of the artist Gordana Kuč in the installation “I am someone else” from 2017. This series of paintings/objects consists of white canvases “dressed” in black fishnet stockings that are variously twisted, bent, loosened and tightened, not only by “filling” the canvas with abstract geometrized patterns, but also by arranging the specific corporification, sensitisation and feminisation of the painting. It is an effective oscillation between the absent and the present, the living body and the body of the painting, between aestheticisation and substitution of marginal states of the female body.

Fishnet stockings, as a symbol of the transgressing of female corporeality, an explication of female sexuality, “incriminate” the neutral, silent white canvas, transforming it from what precedes representation and what is the standard condition of the artistic translation of the scene/body/object into a painting, into what invokes the specific presence of a living body. It is a body-painting caught in the variable geometry of social power, in oppressive mechanisms/networks of eroticisation and aestheticisation of female suffering and submission as a painful ecstasy between coercion and choice, between punishment and pleasure. Locating the feminine as a place of fatal entanglement in the gap of emptiness or in a state of condensation, opacity and binding, this work becomes a sign of the simultaneous impossibility of escaping from a net and the effective use of that same net as a boundary that needs to be tested, stretched and made flexible, manageable.

 Dr. Svetlana Racanović, Art Historian and Art Critic