It is a sight that brings into play traditional art on a modern pedestal and attracts admiration. The area around the torso and the breasts acts as the main canvas while the faces carry the finest details complimented by the dangling beads. The white colour, which is simply earth, creates vivid contrast on the dark skin. The artwork is done on the bare upper body of the young initiates the drawings are usually geometrical and often consist of only lines and dots. Perhaps, the classic display of body art is seen during the initiation ceremony of the Luvale-speaking people of North-Western Province. Body art is a common art form which is still celebrated in modern Zambia maidens are always seen during cultural ceremonies across the country decorated in colourful body art. The Body as Language: Women and Performance is at Richard Saltoun Gallery until November 27.WHILE a crowd of topless maidens flocked the streets of Manzini, Swaziland in a reed dance ceremony, back home, socialite Iris Kaingu stepped into artist Caleb Chisha’s studio completely nude to do a “Painted Princess,” a body paint artwork, in a project in which she is exploring the historical beauty of cultural body paint.īody art is indeed historical and not at all strange to the African heritage. Through several media including performance, installation, sculpture and sound, I explore body practices and contemporary gender politics.” A more visceral exaple of this is her performance piece Teatro anatomico (2012) which saw Giambrone sew an embroidered collar onto her own skin – a harrowing comment on violence, beauty, pain and the subjection of the female body. Giambrone wrote about her practise “I use conceptual art to illustrate my own social commentary with a focus on the relation between subject and power. Such threatening juxtapositions evoke a sense of foreboding that draws on the history of domestic violence. In her work Vertigo, she places prosaic household objects next to each other in unusual pairings – a tape measure sits alongside a hammer, a pair of scissors next to a dinner plate. The work of contemporary artist Silvia Giambrone clearly references the performance art of the 1970s, where everyday objects were used to dissect ideas around human relationships. “We can no longer see ourselves as if we live in a dream," she said on the topic, "or as an imitation of something that just does not reflect the reality of our lives.” Thereafter, Santoro devoted herself to liberating the female body from the male gaze and encouraging women to reassert themselves. Prior to embarking upon this ambitious project, the artist worked as a sculptor and – after moving to Rome and becoming an active member of the feminist movement 'C.Lonzi’s Rivolta Femminile' – began to look at how male artists smoothed and idealised female genitalia, committing an act of biological censorship on women’s bodies. Suzanne Santoro's 1974 publication Towards New Expression saw the New York artist align images of classical statuary with photographs of female genitalia in an effort to take back the representation of the female body from the hands of male artists. Unsurprisingly, the radical publication caused a stir among viewers and art critics of the time, and famously led to Santoro's censorship from the ICA's Artists’ Books exhibition in 1976. In Azione Sentimentale (1974), Pane pressed the thorns from a bouquet of red and white roses into her arms, which she described as a “projection of an intra space.” The powerful and recurring image of her own blood makes Pane’s art both unflinchingly rich in meaning and visually sublime. The cuts below her eyebrows caused her to blood to trickle down the face like scarlet tears. In the performance of Psyche in 1974, the stood in front of a mirror where she used a razor blade to make incisions onto her face and navel. Whilst the candles and bed suggested ideas of sexual love and pleasure, the manner in which Pane positioned her body around these objects caused her harm and surreptitiously threw up questions around the fixed notions of pleasure and pain. In her performance piece entitled The Conditioning (1973), for example, she lay down on a metal bedframe situated perilously over an area of burning candles. She is best known for personally inflicted physical suffering. French artist Gina Pane was a founder and leading member of Art Corporel, the Body Art Movement in France during the 1970s, and throughout all of her work she uses the body as a site for exploring ideas around discomfort, experience and empathy.
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