what is a woman if not her bust? - Original Art - Dania Abdalla
Dania Abdalla
what is a woman if not her bust?
20x24in
mixed media collage on canvas
******This piece is part of Free Music: The Illusion of Liberation, on view at Eaton House. Artwork will remain in the exhibition space until the deinstall of the show and will be available for pickup afterward.
--
About the Artwork
Animating a play on the word "bust", Dania Abdalla juxtaposes two female subjects compositionally, historically, and socio-politically. At their crux, they are equal reflections of objectification in greyscale. One is sexualized, the other is idealized.
Beneath the question, this piece is testimony to the artists’s long and arduous process negotiating the terms of revealing her own body vis-à-vis religious, cultural, and familial expectations to perform respectability. Finally coming to an internal compromise, she chose to overlay her breasts with the eyes that she fears will rebuke and vilify her bodily agency.
What persists is ambivalence and suggestion, which insists upon the initial question: what is a woman — if not her body as sexualized or her status and identity as a symbol of power, authority, and respect — outside of the patriarchal social paradigm? Perhaps the untethered subject in the periphery, the primordial snake, knows.
Artist Bio
Dania is a self-taught artist, working primarily in mixed media and digital collage. Her practice examines the unconscious psyche of troubled feminine subjects in confrontation with their milieu through “imaginal” portraiture and figure. Of other and self, she utilizes bold color against black & white, expressionism against abstraction, and incorporates personal everyday items and mementos in assemblage and collage.
Dania Abdalla
what is a woman if not her bust?
20x24in
mixed media collage on canvas
******This piece is part of Free Music: The Illusion of Liberation, on view at Eaton House. Artwork will remain in the exhibition space until the deinstall of the show and will be available for pickup afterward.
--
About the Artwork
Animating a play on the word "bust", Dania Abdalla juxtaposes two female subjects compositionally, historically, and socio-politically. At their crux, they are equal reflections of objectification in greyscale. One is sexualized, the other is idealized.
Beneath the question, this piece is testimony to the artists’s long and arduous process negotiating the terms of revealing her own body vis-à-vis religious, cultural, and familial expectations to perform respectability. Finally coming to an internal compromise, she chose to overlay her breasts with the eyes that she fears will rebuke and vilify her bodily agency.
What persists is ambivalence and suggestion, which insists upon the initial question: what is a woman — if not her body as sexualized or her status and identity as a symbol of power, authority, and respect — outside of the patriarchal social paradigm? Perhaps the untethered subject in the periphery, the primordial snake, knows.
Artist Bio
Dania is a self-taught artist, working primarily in mixed media and digital collage. Her practice examines the unconscious psyche of troubled feminine subjects in confrontation with their milieu through “imaginal” portraiture and figure. Of other and self, she utilizes bold color against black & white, expressionism against abstraction, and incorporates personal everyday items and mementos in assemblage and collage.