IB Visual Arts

Rubaba Khandaker

You walk up to this exhibition, inching your face a little too close to the artworks for comfort as your eyes level with someone else’s. Instantly, you notice her audacity to exist. To stare back at you, as you stare at her. This woman holds an apple, and it scares you. But what makes you more scared, the apple? Or what might happen if she bites it? “What kind of horrors will be revealed once she bites?” You’d ask yourself, suddenly noticing the wetness of her eyes, and a silvery band wrapping around her head. Your gaze is uninterested as it soaks up the glossiness of her lips. You move on.

Your eyes go in shock as they are suddenly blasted with bright bursts of pink, and pink, and more pink! It feels so sticky, so sickly sweet and nauseating – and it disgusts you seeing so many girls licking up that sugar with their freakish tongues. Their naked bodies seem to be deriving pleasure from the sweetness, and you can’t look away from their grotesque femininity. Their Vile, Grotesque, Femininity.

“Vile, Grotesque, Femininity.” This is the name I have given to my overall curated exhibition of the artworks I have created over the final year of my IBDP. This exhibition explores some of the different aspects of the crude and subtle ways a person can villainise someone based almost only on the fact of them presenting feminine. All of the artworks are named with reference to biblical events and knowledge, as one of the prevailing reasons for the objectification and fetishisation of femininity in our 21st Century, and years past, has been religion. Artworks such as, Wrath., Gluttony., Lust., and Pride., are named after 4 of the 7 deadly sins. Meanwhile, Vanity. and Humility. directly contrast each other in name, nature, and composition placement. And in the centre of it all, sits Eve. She has been specifically placed in the centre of the composition because the biblical Eve is coincidentally the first human woman, as well as the cataclysm of the original sin and the fall of man. This, of course, is how many religious individuals that follow the bible justify their (often-violent) misogyny. So, she is physically and symbolically in the centre of this problem – that, and it is aesthetically pleasing to have the biggest artwork lay in the centre.

Both photographic and acrylic-on-canvas mediums were used to display these concepts. However different these mediums may be, their cohesion lays in the messages they represent and their relationship to one-another. The cartoonish, caricature figures of the acrylic paintings are meant to personify my personal abstract understandings of misogyny and the fetishisation of femininity. Albeit, maybe a little hyperbolised for a dramatic flair. But from these painted hyperboles, are derived the photographic components of the composition. The photographs provide a more relatable perspective into these issues, since they all show how the events of the paintings may play out in the real world. The derivative nature of these photographs are also the reason why they all sit on the outer edges of the composition.

This entire exhibition stems from my own internal prejudice against the femininity that I have only recently began to fully embrace – as seen in the hyper-feminine aesthetics of most of the composition. Pink, to me, was evil. It was fake, manipulative, and “much too girly.” Skin, and the feminine body, was sinful. To exist as a woman was a crime deserving of all the punishment that came with it. The hate, the assault, and the male gaze (which focuses on separating a woman from her body). This gaze, of course, is also present throughout all of the artworks in the composition, as seen in the way every woman in the exhibition is missing at least their eyes, or their mouths, or even their entire face. Except for once – in the 2nd series of Humility. But this is only so, because that image comes directly from the eyes of the subject herself.

Then, you finally take a few steps back from the exhibition. You see it at last. The over-arching beast with its watchful eyes. Preying. Slowly, you realise that the silvery band was you.