The Object Stares Back

Mostra collettiva.

Comunicato stampa

Tube Culture Hall is pleased to announce The Object Stares Back, a group show of Victoria Cantons, Lydia Pettit, Olivia Sterling and Xu Yang, curated by Mattia Pozzoni.

From critical text by Mattia Pozzoni:

Our gaze is never ingenuous. When we look around ourselves there’s a permanent set of categories that inform our seeing.

Art history is the history of artworks seen through a male perspective. The female body, a central focus of endless masterpieces from Botticelli's Venus to Courbet’s 1866 Origin of the World, has rarely been portrayed by a woman. If women have never been able to tell their stories, their bodies have often been objectified. As English art critic John Berger wrote in his 1973 Ways of Seeing, describing media culture’s shaping of gender politics and the woman as object: “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” Women perceive themselves through a male gaze laid on them. They are object more than subject of vision. After centuries, the object stares back. And confronts us, portraying the world in a new unique way.

We want to suggest a shift from a male, objectifying gaze, to a different and open perspective, one which identifies female as protagonists. We want to stop looking at women through a heterosexual male lens and identify them as a passive non-actor, secondary to the active male characters. Four artists, Victoria Cantons, Lydia Pettit, Olivia Sterling and Yang Xu share personal reflections, critiques and stories, embracing the active role of being the ones forwarding narratives.

Each artist presents a different nuance of what informs the notion of female gaze, a sophisticated, delicate yet powerful and firm way to challenge the norm and describe our relationships. They lay themselves bare, physically and psychologically, underlining the beauty and truth of what renders human and distant from conventions every living woman.