CelineSianiDjiakoua

Pieces submitted for Icarealot . "Women's body hair removal is strongly normative within contemporary Western culture. Although often trivialised, (...) the hairlessness norm powerfully endorses the assumption that a woman's body is unacceptable if unaltered; its very normativity points to a socio-cultural presumption that hairlessness is the appropriate condition for the feminine body." "Gender and body hair: constructing the feminine woman", abstract extract The pieces I presented  for  ICareALot  were especially made to take part in the debate about Middle East, from a post-feminist point of view. They were dedicated to the Iranian photographer Mehraneh Atashi  who had just been arrested around the same time when I came across the Icarealot call for submission. The necklaces were made thinking of the women who could wear them as a passive sign of rebellion against a certain male abuse of power. As the pieces come as beautiful objects to wear

Pecha Kucha is a Japanese concept for a slide show presentation of 20 slides with 20seconds per slide. For my presentation I wanted to show images from a project I had been working at, a couple of years ago, without reaching the final stage. I introduced it as "the journey through my own story within the bigger frame of History and how this has shaped my  identity in some unexpected ways". listen to a live track of the night : BBC Stoke I wasn't quite satisfied with the presentation itself as it would have taken much more preparation to obtain the result I was looking for but I had very good feed-backs that were telling me that I was on the right tracks. I find the slide show + voice-over/comments very interesting as a format because 2 parallel discourses/stories can be told : the one of the images and the one of the voice over. I like the ambiguities such a situation can create and I would like to work at it in the form of a short movie. images : Mark

Jenny Saville "Branded" painting Vanessa Beecroft "VB55" performance http://www.vanessabeecroft.com/frameset.html Pipilotti Rist "Sip My Ocean" 1996 video installation. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=1peuM6dvr9o Introduction Representing naked female bodies nowadays in contemporary Art can still be a challenge. In a context of Post feminism/third wave feminism, how can the representation of the female naked body by contemporary female artists be understood and perceived? In the present essay, we will look at the work of three contemporary female artists in the fields of painting ( Jenny Saville - J.S. - , Branded, 1991 ), performance ( Vanessa Beecroft, - V.B. - VB55, 2005 ) and video installation ( Pipilotti Rist, P.R. - Sip my ocean, 1996 ). Those three pieces were chosen as they offer three different types of representation for the female naked or semi-naked body. References to these works all acknowledge their feminist conte