CCI Fabrika, Uno Basement, Moscow
Curated by Eldar Ganeev
About the exhibition
"Girls Matter" explores the fabrication of femininity through the lens of popular culture. It focuses on clichés, imposed ideals, the absurdity of ready-made identities, and the pursuit of individuality that often turns into a consumerist trap. Provocative slogans, mass-market T-shirts, sparkling rhinestones — the artist appropriates this language of fleeting fashion and translates it into painting. Sexualized rhinestone slogans borrowed from women’s T-shirts are layered over online-found images of little “princess” girls, where two ready-made codes collide: innocence and adult cliché. Painting renders tangible the artificiality of these prepackaged images and the repetitive nature of fashion aesthetics. What was once instantly consumable becomes slow, heavy, and labor-intensive.
The project avoids a didactic tone and doesn’t claim an external position. A self-portrait based on a childhood photograph, captioned Drama Queen, acts as a gesture of self-irony and acknowledgment of the artist’s own complicity within the system. By turning her face into a surface for a slogan, she admits to being a product of the very culture she critiques. Irony and kitsch become the material of the work, evoking recognition and an awkward smile in the viewer.
