February 3, 2023 – February 5, 2023
Artists: Ingrid Berthon-Moine | Basia Bieniek | Monika Chlebek | Janet Currier | Simone Haack | Jane Hoodless | Serpil Mavi Üstün | Lorena Prain | Florence Reekie | Maayan Sophia Weisstub | Caroline Wong
MAMA is proud to present Fetish, its inaugural group exhibition consisting of 11 intergenerational and international women artists. This exhibition is a celebration that seeks to reframe the ‘fetish’ as something equally experienced and seen by women. While historically, the notion of the fetish has been viewed through the domain of masculine sexuality, we open and untangle it to a broader experiential spectrum of physical pleasure iconography – through vision, touch, taste, smell, even sound. In that sense, a fetish becomes both: a desire for an embodied state, stimulated by aesthetic and sensory stimuli like fabric, clothing, food and of course, nudity and the body, but also an idealised, sanctified entity, often almost to the point of parody.
‘Fetish has always been a word of sinister pedigree, … discursively promiscuous and theoretically suggestive’ wrote William Pietz in his anthropological study of its history. And while fetish as a sexualised notion began to crystallise at the end of the 19th century, the unchanging and transhistorical elements of its meaning are irreducible materiality and inherently problematic relationship to women.
Heavily explored by the Surrealists, fetish became almost site-specific to the female body – a trope that not only furthered the social objectification and subjugation of women, but crucially, which undermined the autonomy of the figure of a female artist. The association of ‘woman’ with male fantasies which permeated so much of Surrealist work, stood in stark contrast to the female artists’ need for creative freedom and expression. A construct of the Surrealist fetish, women were thus seen as sites or objects of desire, rather than agential subjects, equally capable of experiencing it.
Famously theorised by psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, fetish was for a long time a phenomenon observed almost exclusively in men and by men. One of the first artists to break the tradition was Meret Oppenheim whose ‘Déjeuner en Fourrure’ (1936) became a spectacle and public fixation to the point of becoming a fetishised object in itself, derailing the male gaze from the female figure as object of desire par excellence and crucially, paving the way for a more nuanced legacy seen in the works of women artists today.
The artists featured in the show continue the tradition of breaking with the stereotype of the hyper-sexualised transgressive fetish, suggesting that it extends far beyond into the realms of sensory delight and aesthetic fulfilment. In his ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, André Breton observed that our ‘experience is increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to emerge’. In a desire to unlock that cage, the works in this show seek to reframe objects, situations, feelings through humour or irony, giving them new meanings in new contexts, and refocusing our attention to those elements which can make everyday things appear extraordinary. In our approach, we stick to the notion of fetish as imbued in materiality; the fetish is physical, embodied and by consequence, fundamentally experiential, adding a phenomenological lens to the exploration of pleasure and desire.
Photo: Caroline Wong, Watermelon, 2022, acrylic, oil, and oil pastel on board, 25.5 x 35.50 cm, courtesy by MAMA