FEMINIST

FEMINIST Text by Babara Vinken FEMINIST hovers between the realms of fashion and performance, critique and joke. Throughout this Video, Catrine Val transforms herself again and again through the assistance of often cobbled-together, yet thrilling, disguises. Construction is at the forefront of this work. Construction is purposefully evident in the meticulous process of Val’s transformation; furthermore, the construct, the artificialso to speak, is unraveled in each and every portrait. The palpable elements of dress, props and backdrops are dazzling tothe eye, but often out of reach.The backdrops also follow a role and repertoire and act as a stage setting. Place is not important if it does not emphasize and accentuate the image of the subject. The anonymous environments,thus take on a similarly interchangeable quality of the artist and function as an intersection for reality and fantasy. In FEMINIST, Catrine Val records situations whose very banalityends them the archetypical character of myths of the commonplace. The persons are composed with the same care as paintings and are just about always attractively framed, are the complete opposite of snapshots. They bear thepast within themselves—as something that has been survived, left behind, taken leave of. In these images, clothes are worn in a radically anti-modish manner.These clothes do not bring the past alive or into the present. Rather, they conjure up the sense of the bygone. For this reason, the person depicted on the photograph usually seems utterly out of place, incongruous, inappropriate, shoehorned into absurd geometric correspondences. The clothes may be an allegory for this carefully “fitted” incongruous inappropriateness, although these almost never have to be made to fit the person shown in the picture. The figure in these selfportraits does not have a place anywhere; her time is not the present, and the moment depicted is an impossibility.