137: Susana Barbará

137: Video Installation and Photographs by Susana Barbará
The battered woman is ashamed of herself. The battered woman is convinced that she is guilty and deserves the consequent punishment. She isolates herself from friends, colleagues and family. She voids herself.
Battered women’s “not knowing what to do” becomes, in Barbará’s video installation, a performance of the void. A void in action.
Of uncertainty.
Of loneliness.
Of a cut-off path. Dialing the 137 helpline is a remote recourse.

Bandages protect a woman and, at the same time, keep her blinded. A man’s hand, in a gesture that expresses the psychopath’s tender phrase, moves the bandages aside, causes them to drop, and, in so doing, reveals convictions about herself which he himself has generated in that woman: “I provoked him”… “It’s my fault”… The sound of slow and deep breathing that backgrounds the action drops away.
In fact, it takes breath away.

Barbará sharpens the reality of the pain by giving exquisite and beautiful expression to what is abominable, and, in this way, leads the issue of battered women into the arena of “the given,” of what is more frequent than one believes… Barbará creates a series of works that document “laurels” of Western civilization that might be deployed in a museum gallery. This is how Barbará draws out, from this given situation, a certain bitter sense of humor that constitutes a help to surviving, to rendering objective and, probably, to exposing the ill.

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Publicado en Leedor el 14-07-2012