Katya Ev in residency: Lactating Bodies
Invited by CC Strombeek, Katya Ev is one month in residency at Jester (Genk, B) where she will work on the sculptural articulations of her research Lactating Bodies
01/06 – 30/06/2024. Open studio: 29 – 30/06
The practice of Katya Ev (1983, Moscow, lives and works in Brussels) investigates the complex relationship between society, economy, body, aiming to uncover our potential for political agency within dominant power structures.
By subverting objects that belong to state power, tools of everyday capitalism (laws, contracts), or rituals and gestures perceived as ordinary or banal, Ev constructs her performative language in order to reflect on socio-political and cultural codes and change the status quo in artistic and non-artistic realms. During her residency in spring at Jester (Genk) she will work on the further development of a long-term artistic and research project called Lactating Bodies initiated at the end of 2022. It deals with an intimate but also highly political and urgent topic, namely, practices of lactation. It emerges as a prolongation of her participatory performative practice that activates different questions about society, the economy, and the body.
Lactating Bodies delves into an intimate yet profoundly political subject: lactation and milk, which have recently gained increasing prominence within feminist agendas. The project brings together poetic and political perspectives on lactation and milk, interrogating the presence of female lactating bodies in public spaces and milk as a cultural metaphor.
CC Strombeek invites Katya Ev for a one-month residency in June 2024, specifically dedicated to an in-depth elaboration around the transformation of milk and its sculptural aspects.
This idea to create sculpture from milk is directly influenced by Ev’s personal experience of breastfeeding and motherhood, which is rooted in her early sculptural practice. In 2009, while still studying at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris, she created Untitled (the dwell), a sculpture that used milk as a material and that has been re-exhibited several times (Over my (dead) body, 2019). The sculptures created from milk aim to make visible what is normally concealed between the breast and the mouth of a baby. By presenting milk in this form, the public is given the opportunity to conceive its expressibility, “its capacity to become images, and be made metaphorical”.1
Practical
Locatie:
Jester Genk
Schachtboklaan 10/11
3600 Genk
Open studio: 29 – 30/06/2024
1 – Melanie Jackson and Esther Leslie, “Unreliable Matriachs”, in Making Milk. The Past, Present and Future of Our Primary Food, ed. Mathilde Cohen and Yoriko Otomo, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017