Search Me In The Flowers. Solo show.

Udmurt Republican Art Museum. Izhevsk. Russia. Supported by PERMM museum of contemporary art.
Curated by Naila Allahverdiyeva.

Femininity in the Light of the Phytolamp

​Despite the ever-increasing quantity of genders, our choice is nevertheless limited by different proportions-variations of male-female and a fairly restricted range of grounds for the rejection of evasions of this basic binary principle. Katya Tzareva, with her project “Search Me in the Flowers” opens up another stage in the formation of gender identity.

At first glance, the very title of the exhibition directly draws attention to the female. Flowers are a substitute for femininity, an allegory for the transience of female beauty. Poets often use botanical euphemisms in their descriptions of female genitals. Blossoming is a literal metaphor for female fertility. The insistent and clearly manipulative repetition of the phrase “Search me in the flowers” also indicates the feminine – like a mantra, the repetition is autistically pronounced off-camera by the heroine of the video installation, indiscriminately providing all of the viewers with male characteristics.

The pink light of the phytolamp in the room with the houseplants also points towards the unambiguously feminine – it is a key element in the exhibition. This is the color of hydroponics, forbidden desires and joys, a tempting and at the same time universal designation for the maidenly, both in the subculture and in the mass culture fields. Pink makes anything it gets onto feminine. However, shifting from a light installation to pictures, it changes its notional valency – girlhood turns out to be an imputed quality, something that is external in relation to the individual. The characters in the pictures are lost in their femininity, the fact of female blossoming takes them unawares. We observe them in the phase of fading, in indecision, against the background of a tamed, enslaved nature that is deprived of naturalness. The plants are hidden in greenhouses, placed on lawns, incarcerated in pots. Nature is altered, oppressed, subordinated. This is by no means the model for Paradise. The heroines of Katya Tzareva’s pictures resist what is prescribed, they are not ready to accept themselves in their bodily predetermination. The result of accepting themselves as women, after all, will be the fulfillment of the notorious “gender role” enforced on them by culture and traditions. We find them in a state of pause brought on by a wish to slow down the formation of a woman, to endlessly prolong the pure potentiality and inherent value of blossoming, to dissolve in that element that isn’t obliged to bear fruit.

The evil of nature is indeed the nature of evil – “in the shadow of young girls in flower” you desire comfort and total control, but nature requires risk and dependence. In such moments, consciousness is indignant, and the body freezes in indecision.

In English, defloration (the loss of virginity) and deflowering (rape) have one and the same meaning – a tearing off of flowers. Becoming a woman is directly linked with trauma and violence committed on beauty. Who will we encounter in following the demanding voice of the heroine of the video “Search Me in the Flowers”? A Madonna in flowers? Ophelia in flowers?