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