bee flowers - liberation

Seeing those photos from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, I decided I was looking at the perfect conflation of two constituents of Julia Kristeva's 'Abject': Horror and the Female. Every theater of war requires specific armory, and here America had produced a narrowly targeted new weapon, incorporating a kind of 'vagina dentate', designed to inflict maximum psychological damage in Islamic societies. A soldier genitally equipped to shock and terrify. That female soldier subjugating a man on a leash, makes for a clear visualization of a standoff between worlds that are increasingly growing apart regarding gender issues.

Decades of Western gender politics has eroded the dividing line between gender roles and relegated it to its current porous state; through the de-marginalization of the Other, the male Self has lost in clear definition and socially determined purpose. So too, the Islamic world has changed during the past decades: conservative interpretations of Islam have gained influence, and the traditional segregation of the sexes is increasingly (re-) enforced. And so, Western and Islamic nations are moving in opposite directions, away from an earlier common ground regarding gender roles.

One of the Abu Ghraib prisoners stated: "beatings don't hurt us … the worst insult [is] to feel like a woman". This self-exposing, misogynistic statement curiously confounds the opposition of oppressor/oppressed in the given context, thereby complicating the surrounding issues of morality and guilt.

Transgression triggers Horror. The worst case scenario for the patriarchic male Self - a reversal of the gender hierarchy - has been implemented.

Rather than creating the work from a single-point (ideological) perspective, I incorporated a number of responses to social and cultural trends, so that the work might embody contemporary differences and disjunctures.