ARTIST STATEMENT
As simple as that: I don’t know whether I dress up for myself or for someone else.
Submission is so deeply ingrained in us it has become a second skin.
There’s a host of reasons for our submissiveness, but I only fathom a couple of them.
Although men’s history made us submissive, we need to show them they have been wrong. And we must also accept not all women will agree with us.
I was 14, with a smiley face, when I realized society spares no one: “She is so beautiful; it’s a shame she’s got gapped teeth.”
During the 80s I still remember hating my flat body – too little, no curves, small boobs…
A controlling indoctrination invades our entire body, our poses, our movements, our pleasures, our freedom. Which girl has never heard of “Girls don’t sit like that!”?
I assume we’ve been lured by the system. The Bible says women are to be submissive; beautification seduces us with aesthetic procedures, which range from buccal fat removal to vaginal rejuvenation; fast fashion industry teaches us how to become “empowered”, lawmakers rule over our uterus.
My art intends to question what the system perpetuates, how women’s body and mind are shaped or domesticated since we are born.
I’ve just read the Woman Life Freedom Curatorial Statement and as far as I could understand, submissiveness in Iran makes women “disappear”. Religion turned them into a thing. And in my opinion, capitalism turned all of us into a more ornamented thing.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Karina Walter (1976) is a Brazilian visual artist and has been living in the USA since 2018. She has a background in photography and makes collages and mixed media objects. She works with fashion magazines and materials she finds at home during her daily routine. In her work, she attempts to emphasize women’s domesticated body and mind, challenging what she believes are well-grounded manipulative ideas controlled by the system, which means the power of fashion and beauty industries, media, governments and religion – all of them under the umbrella of patriarchalism.
She has been studying about woman history and reality on different online courses.
She graduated in Industrial Pharmacy (2000), has a Master’s in Marketing (2005) and was “part of the system” for eleven years. In 2011 she moved to Spain and studied photography at the Centro Internacional de Fotografía y Cine, in Madrid. She also lived in Germany and after being back to Brazil she took a collage course at Tomie Ohtake Institute in Sao Paulo (2017). Experiencing different cultures gives her confidence in doing her work.
Her collages have been shown in group exhibitions in Brazil, Spain, Mexico, Slovenia and her mixed media work in London.
© Karina Walter