ARTiculAction Art Review - Special Issuue Aug. 2016 | Page 48

ICUL CTION C o n t e m p o r a r y A r t meets R e v i e w Petra Paul and Ophira Avisar An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected] Over these months artists Petra Paul and Ophira Avisar have established an effective collaboration: when triggering the spectatorship's limbic parameters to rethink and critique the themes of gender-stereotyping, sexism and patriarchy, they accomplish the difficult task of drawing the viewers to rethink to the relationship between their cultural substratum and the stereotypized idea of woman. Both feminist artists, Paul's and Avisar's is an effective tool to fight against wide variety of issues that still affect our globalized and unstable contemporary age: we are very pleased to introduce our readers to Paul's and Avisar's stimulating and multifaceted artistic production. Hello Petra and Ophira and welcome to ARTiculAction: to start this interview, would you like to tell us something about your background? How do your training experiences influence your evolutions as artist? In particular how do your cultural substratums inform the way you relate yourself to art making and to the aesthetic problem in general? Ophira Avisar: Hello ARTiculAction. Thank you for this opportunity to tell your readers about Petra's and mine meeting and artistic cooperation especially in "transformation" and more. I say my training is on going. It started one day 18 when I was a child and I discovered that I prefer looking on any other of the senses. The idea that I can create something that others want to see was hypnotic. My first teachers were Zvi Tadmor and Yaakov Epshtein. The first a painter and the second a sculptor. They introduced me to the bliss of succeeding to achieve the "je ne sais quoi" of art. After them came many teachers in many places. Till now my training continues. Petra is one of my teachers as well. Petra Paul: Hello and thank you for inviting us. I always drew a lot. After a lot of different artistic expressions, I found my way in the 1990ies, when feminist and gender theory influenced my thinking. I see my work as a political statement. Usually I studied art history. It is in Austria very multidisciplinary, so I studied also feminist art history at the University of Applied Art, feminist film theory, feminist philosophy, also psychology, literature… I started with a series of waxed clothes, called ”strip, no body for nobody”. I was thinking with it about the scopophilia and voyeuristic male gaze. Then I learnt how to print photographs and I started with gender-role games in front of the camera, playing with womanliness and masculinity, wearing a beard and lipstick or female earrings. As a travesty of the travesty. Then I thought about misogyny, women are seen as unclean because of for example menstruation. So since 15 years I make art with my menstrual blood. Then I