The Birds
Ulla Deventer
Cuba, 2019, ongoing
Supported by VLIROUS Belgium and the ING UNSEEN TALENT AWARD.
My international long-term project on sex work has made me think a lot about how we women are shaped by social norms, especially our sex life. In addition, sex work reflects taboos and longings and the pain of isolation. I wonder what a contemporary family should look like in our restless and shattered world. On the one hand, women no longer need a provider, on the other hand, they still have to (must) live in economic dependence.
To what extent do we fulfil our own lives or the expectations of society?
Is monogamy a lie?
How can binary perspectives on gender be dismantled?
In 2019 I was invited to do research in Cuba. Cuba offers me a complex terrain to explore this theme; It hit me how the country is still today often represented by the seductive “Caribbean Beauty”, colonial images of the male gaze that exoticize women’s bodies and reduce them to an object of desire. You can find several online platforms where men exchange their experiences with Cuban women which complements these visions of male fantasies. The only deliberated voices of Cuban women can be found in independent press whose writers are traced by the Cuban government and risk their freedom.
Based on close relationships I built with local women, I began to wonder how women perceive their position in society that they call “machista”. The understanding and roots of a patriarchal society is elementary for my research, because it leads into a complex global issue which is to be broken up.
What are ideas on independence, love and sexuality?
I intend to challenge our binary way of looking at gender balance with stories of isolation, power and the longing for intimacy and love, illustrating the most primitive human need as the most complex one.
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Ulla Deventer, born 1984 in Germany, holds a Master of Fine Arts and is an international working artist and research candidate at the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten Antwerp.
Since 2019, she became part of TIME-LABS: Cuba Photography Missions, a research project in Havana, Cuba, supported by VLIR-UOS Belgium and in collaboration with European and Cuban photographers and the Instituto Superior de Arte Havana.
Her work has been exhibited internationally and has been supported by several scholarships and awards. It has been selected for the “Ones to Watch” by the BJP, as well as for the .tiff talents by the Fotomuseum Antwerp. She studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg, the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts de Lyon and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp.
In her works, Deventer questions the interdependencies of women on social norms. She explores the female body, ideas of beauty, taboos, and sexuality. Recently, she has been involved in international research on sex work, based in Brussels, Athens, Paris and Accra.
Throughout my practical and theoretical based art, I work across mediums, with a focus on photography. I explore forms of the female body, ideas of beauty, desires, taboos and sexuality. Subsequently, I analyze the interdependencies of women on social norms. I am interested in how society shapes norms that influence the representation and perception of women and how the female body can be used as a tool of power.
Sex workers are sensitive observers of our society, especially about what we do not dare to see. Thus, I consider this work a reflection on society as a whole. Sex is at first place about pleasure, desire and lust, addiction and ecstasy. At the same time, it is about power, about hierarchies, about interrelationships of men and women. It appears that the female body becomes a political weapon. How we live and talk about sex says much about our taboos and fantasies and finally how society is created by a world that exists by judging the unknown instead of listening to each other.
I am grateful for every single conversation and the time I could spend with the women who became part of this work. I cannot express in words how much they taught me about life, about our society and finally about myself.
I did not believe how much we have in common. I found my soulmates in these women who are not only crucial for the existence of this body of work, but close friends that I don ‘t want to miss anymore.
With this work I share some personal insights that truly are my own observations and therefor fully subjective on this topic. It is a collection of images and notes from women I admire and who I met in Brussels, Athens, Paris and Accra.
Butterflies Are a Sign of a Good Thing
“Sometimes I imagine
Asking my boyfriend:
Can you believe
Your girlfriend is one of them?”
A long-term artistic research on sex work and the position of the women in society seeking for a visual language that reveals personal and therefore subjective views on sex work, because it is based on the close relationships with the sex workers themselves.
It was grant-aided by the VG Bildkunst, Stiftung Kulturwerk (2017) and the Rudolf Augstein Stiftung (2018). Moreover, it is part of my research at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp.