ARTIST STATEMENT
In 2011, I ended my professional career in Marketing. I packed my belongings and joined my husband in his international career. I had decided to study photography in Spain. When I signed up at the local city hall in our new city, I was classified as “housewife.” Had I become a housewife? (I realized that the system made its own assumptions.) This is a convenient term—housewife. To deny women any public space, they allocated us to the house and to the family. Some years ago, I started looking for answers to the origin of this domestic situation that sticks women in a secondary social role.
I’m interested in the unfolding of patriarchal discourse: the naturalization of gender roles, how it curtails women’s lives, and the historical layers as a consequence of it, which accumulate in our bodies. And we (women) don’t know our bodies beyond this discourse. The house symbolizes the woman’s resignation to her domestic role, and to avoid feeling like its hostage, I explore my relationships (as body and as woman) to my house, or what house could mean, during my practice.
I work with ordinary non-artistic materials related to body and house maintenance routines as well as other objects identified as feminine. The house environment has become my laboratory where I find a basis to create new bodies and give form and space to all of these restless questions.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Karina is a Brazilian multidisciplinary artist who has lived in Charlotte, NC, since 2018. She works in a variety of techniques, including assemblage, installation, performance, and sculpture, to explore the historical layers of ‘women’s culture’ that originated from patriarchal discourse. She graduated in Industrial Pharmacy in 2000, has a Master’s in Marketing in 2005, and studied Semiotics in 2010 (unfinished). In 2011, she moved to Spain and studied photography in Madrid. She also lived in Germany and, after returning to Brazil, studied collage in 2017. She moved to the USA in 2018 and, since 2023, she has had her studio in Brazil and lives between both countries. She took part in some international group exhibitions in Brazil, Mexico, Spain, London, Slovenia and Chicago.
© Karina Walter