[ RED BIND - Gilivanka Kedzior & Barbara Friedman ]
Visual Artists
Live and work in Toulouse, France
Olga Walendziak: “Red Bind” is a project investigating limits and ambiguities of gender and body. What was your inspiration to focus on that topic?
RED BIND: Our inspiration comes mainly from our history and our daily lives. The representation of gender is for us one of the many yokes of our present society. The gender, the mere fact of being a man or a woman, still implies a social stereotype that induces an appropriate behavior, and therefore a restriction of individual freedoms and a cause of inequity.
Some of our works focus on the stigmatization due to image and body. The image of woman is linked to a specific index of actions, ideas, codes, just like that of man. Being a woman involves a multitude of things, and this is largely the result of visual appearance, of image…
That’s why we are all the more interested in the ambiguity of gender created by the lack of visual marks, clothes, postures, the transgendered, the reappropriation of codes. This is to neutralize the viewer’s automatic reflexes, to open another lexical field, to get rid of this pre-built apprehension,
fossilized and gangrened by an insidious kind of dictatorship which continues through the ages.
Why should our image as women influence negatively the way we are heard, looked at and valued? This is more than political or social topic. O
ur work is a dialogue, and we would find it difficult to do it without going through this claim of individual freedom.
We must add that we love to play with the confusion generated by the ambiguity of gender. Disturbing the public gives us a great satisfaction. It implies certain intensity in the audience feelings and their perception. This confusion makes the mark we leave much deeper.
OW: The concept of skin and what hides beneath it seems to be an important theme in your projects. Could you tell us more about it?
RB: As we said, we are working, among other subjects, on the stigmatization due to image and body. How to handle this issue without going through the skin, the shell, the visible, recalling that all existence implies its opposite? The wrapping implies what it contains, the shell what it dissimulates or protects, the visible what it hides. The use of zentai suits is a way of playing with our identity, our gender. From a symbolical point of view, if we go beyond their meaning of submission in the sadomasochistic or fetishistic world, they raise certain questions about the covering or the uniform.
Our suit becomes like a second skin; very close to the body, it gives a feeling of nakedness; it is a mask, some camouflage full of contradictions, since it makes us almost nude and draws the attention of all the people present.
OW: Another theme that has caught our attention was the idea of “double” – as in double gender identity or double personality. Why do you use it in your work?
RB: The double builds our lives. We’ve always been linked to someone, starting with our mother. The child knows that they exist as a dependent and independent being, when he becomes aware that his mother is not a part of himself and that he has no power to control his mother’s hands as he can command his own hands.
The link and the double are inseparable; they concern more or less every human being. It’s a kind of universal concept. The double is first of all the other one; the subject is more than wide… In our case, the fact of working as a couple, and what’s more as a gay couple, quickly led us to work on this theme.
Our double portraits are also born from this idea of the double. Twice as much impact: two characters answering each other in their symbolism.
OW: Some of your performances are interactive. In what ways can the audience participate?
RB: The interactivity of our performances is related to our way of understanding the performative act in itself. We navigate between stage and audience.
[ ACANTHESTHESIA #1 ] is the first performance of an evolving series based on a common structure. The foundations of this structure are: a video and how we act during this video.
We move very slowly towards the public, with an economy of gestures and movements that makes us look like two puppets. We wander among the audience and begin our interaction when the emotion aroused by the video begins to emerge. This emotion is a subjective datum, which we feel growing within ourselves, or which becomes tangible on the faces of the audience.
Each of us, independently of the other, chooses her own modus operandi of approach and stares at the face of a spectator who will then seem moved or touched, or yet, impassible. Eye to eye, we endeavor to collect the emotions emerging on the faces of the watchers.
We look at those who look, watching our video. We try to read their emotions, in their immediacy. We modify their expressions by the mere act of our presence and the intensity of our gaze. We do not touch them physically, we address them no accusatory glance.
Our eye wants to be documentary and, at times, possibly empathetic. This scenario runs in a random way, depending on the emotional encounters. This performance format is meant to be an emotional and sensitive improvisation, a meeting with the public around another language, where words have no weight anymore, a shared moment, from deep within our work.
OW: What is the most difficult part of your work?
RB: Construction of each artwork ranges from the disconcerting facility of an obvious birth, excitement
and total exhaustion. What remains the most difficult for us is to show our work, due to the lack of resources, of appropriate places and to the current political, economical and cultural context.
Moreover, an event such as Dimanche Rouge is a miracle for visual artists who practice performance
art!
OW: When and why did you start working together?
RB: We met in November 2009. Our collaboration was committed by chance, during the preparation of [ LOVELY VIRGIN DOLLS: 7 Women’s Skins ], an installation performance which revealed our complementarities and raised our encounter for granted. Gilivanka was giving birth to her first performance and I (Barbara) proposed myself as an assistant. One thing led to another and I provided her with my technical and sensitive abilities in order to
construct the sound envelope of the performance. First common work, this installation performance carries within itself the items at the basis of all our
subsequent research: a cleverly considered aesthetic, minimalistic yet powerful; a subtle and haunting universe of sounds and visuals; a performative act that places the audience in the heart of the work, by the emerging use of participative processes. The [RED BIND] project was born from this first experiment.
We make it a point of honor to deal with issues related to our own personal experiences and to our history as women.
We favor a straight and anti-demagogic talk; a heightened and upright emotion; a sensitive language, understandable to all, inviting the viewer to free thinking.
OW: What other artists, writers or musicians inspire you?
RB: A few weeks ago, an artist called Tejal Shah made a deep impression on us at the Paris-Delhi-Bombay exhibition, at Centre Pompidou. Some of her work reflecting the theme of woman completely overturned us… Her website is: http://www.tejals.com
Other artists worth mentioning are: Bill Viola for his more than sensitive approach of video art; unsurprisingly, Marina Abramovic; Berlinde Bruyckere for the strangeness she creates in her sculptures; Andres Serrano for his vision of Beauty; the poetry of Giuseppe Penone; the strength of Louise Bourgeois; or Magdalena Abakanowicz’s memories of flesh…
As for musicians: Arvo Pärt’s suspended notes, the lightness of Ryuichi Sakamoto and other far less
subtle things! Gilivanka’s readings would be: Marguerite Duras, Yoko Ogawa, Wisława Szymborska, John Steinbeck
and a few dozen more…
And for Barbara: Emil Cioran, Pierre Desproges, Merleau Ponty, Bachelard, Shiki Masaoka and many
others.
OW: Would you like to add something?
RB: We’d just like to share a few thanks, opportunities to do so still being too rare… So thank you to the public, without whom what we do would simply be meaningless… What a feeling of intense life he provides us when vibrating with our art! Thanks to Opie Boero Imwinkelried for believing in us that way and for his invaluable support. Thank you for this so relevant interview. And to quote Barbara Streisand, thanks to our parents because if they had believed in us, we might have been happy with becoming as good as gold secretaries…
http://www.kedzior-friedman.org/
Posted on November 25, 2011
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