DO DOLLS DREAM ABOUT PLASTIC SHEEP? - A GATA Editorial
When Donna Haraway wrote her Cyborg Manifesto in 1985, the Second Wave of Feminism has already proclaimed that the personal is political. By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, claimed Haraway, and the subsequent generations of feminists and media critics have attributed that claim to both technological studies and wider gender theory - but 40 years later the chimeric nature of what it means to live in a body in a gendered, technologised and media-driven world is burning itself into the matrices and brushes of artists of new generation.
Those issues - of heterogeneity of photography, objectification, and dialogue with oneself, take physical form in Maja Tyszecka’s cycle of self-portraits. The photographs, taken in Tokyo, famous of the culture of commodification and sexualisation, present the photographer as a doll. With bubble-gum pink hair and porcelain skin, she seems to be transported from a world of mindless joy, negated by the solemn, uncanny atmosphere.
„Objectification is the reason for violence”, claims the artist. „If somebody takes away your humanity, you become an object: there are no rules on how to behave with objects, you can buy it, sell it, destroy it…” Embodying the doll archetype becomes liminal. Tyszecka’s photographs serves as a necessary personal reminder: Tyszecka uses the photographs to talk about topics, which would be unbearable otherwise. The reality of objectification, the pain, sweat and blood that it brings, is smoothed into more abject kind of horror.
Disconnected from its individual perpetrators, objectification trickles down into the matrix of the camera. „Doing self portraits and publishing them makes me feel like my screams are no longer silent", says Tyszecka. „By consciously transmorphing into a doll, I can somehow make it real, not only a personal, isolated experience when it’s something that all women face.”
Sharing the perspective is the subversion of the dynamic.
Director, Photographer, Stylist Maya Tyszecka
Text by Iga Trydulska