The gender constellation of the Biennale, having its brightest stars in Vallie Export and Pipilotti Rist, would remain incomplete without the shows "Katoptron" and "Liberation! - Women and Abu Ghraib," where the theme is treated head-on and somewhat chaotically.
The project "Liberation! - Women and Abu Ghraib" by Dutch native Bee Flowers (curator Svetlana Gusarova) is housed in the Museum of Decorative Arts. This project is inspired by the 2004 events in the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib where U.S. girl-soldiers subjected male Iraqi prisoners to sexual torture.
"Liberation!" exists in this current context. In the art-world the echo of the political scandal of Abu Ghraib was a scandal concerning the works of the Colombian artist Fernando Botero, one of the most recognizable and vital of contemporary artists, whose works are in the collections of 46 museums in the world. His exhibition of 38 paintings, done in his usual manner, plus close to fifty drawings, was shown in several European museums, but refused at all museums in the United States, until the show was taken under the wing of the Marlborough Gallery in New York, and now the Library of California University of Berkeley too. Before he turned to this subject, some American artists (eg, Clinton Fein in installation art, and Richard Serra in sculpture) had dealt with it as well. There were also reports about an exhibition of twenty Iranian artists "Abu Gulag - heavenly garden of freedom," hosted by the Baghdad gallery Dialogue.
The project "Liberation!" - is a series of large computer collages and ten paintings depicting women - U.S. Army soldiers in battle fatigues. Most of all they resemble frames of computer games. Bee Flowers' central character, a girl-warrior named Lynddiebot (ie robot Lynddie) refers to a U.S. Army private by the name of Lynndie England, who posed with Abu Ghraib prisoners in erotically charged and sadistic photos. Lynddie and her friends were just having fun, nothing personal - torture is fun. U.S. military intelligence turned a blind eye, trying to demoralize the prisoners before interrogation. In court, however, 22-year-old Lynddie faced 9 charges, good for 16 years imprisonment.
European intellectual Bee Flowers, who knows the Middle East well and now lives in Moscow, explores the Abu Ghraib prison events as a cultural conflict between the Western and Muslim worlds regarding the hierarchy of the sexes. The artist reflects sexual humiliation of Muslim men at the hands of, figuratively speaking, Protestant women as a key point in a culture-war focused on gender stereotypes and gender hierarchy; an area reminiscent of a minefield. Bee Flowers transforms a political problem into an area of personal ethical and philosophical choice.
Another cause of sex-based generalizations surrounding this scandal was that the only of the bossed to be punished for Abu Ghraib was Janis Karpinski, who was demoted from brigadier-general to colonel by George Bush. (In the U.S. a general can only be demoted by the president himself.)
The artist equips the girl-soldiers with attachable female sexual characteristics. This is the new American weaponry that can defeat the Muslim world. There is the obvious reading of the west: a naked woman-warrior - a mental landmine for traditional Islamic culture. A reading in the spirit of those theorists of counter-terrorism, who offered to bury the suicide-bombers in pig skin, so that such a warrior would not be allowed entry into Islamic paradise despite his VIP-flyer. Regarding this Jesuitry, one Eastern authority sympathetically laughed: "They do not understand Islam." In its belief that by crushing the alien culture one can win the war, the rational dogmatism of the West is no different from any other dogma, including the Islamic ones (remember the destruction of Buddha statues in Afghanistan.) Yes, vagina demoralizes dogmatists, though not Islamic, but Western ones.
There are a number of other readings, less idiotic. Feminist issues, melted together with the epoch of heroic struggle for the liberation of women, has been replaced by a broader, institutionalized, worldview, where the female receives, if not power, then hegemony. What is the hegemony of the female in male culture? Is it limited only to matters of taste? Bee Flowers shows that "civilization's" imperialist war is no different from the primitive savagery of authoritarian Islamic regimes. Imperialism uses women as an alibi of political correctness, its heroes donning female parts as combat camouflage.
Bee Flowers' collages encompass all different kinds of gender related thoughts. He places them quite ingeniously, as signs for the initiated. For example, where in an interior there is a nude woman, near her is a dummy, and the picture on the wall contains the words "Nature" and "Culture" - one of the meaningful oppositions in gender thinking in the 1980's. His exciting game with the ideas of gender could be read as illustrations to a university lecture course - here is Deleuze's plurality of sex, there the animal as a machine, and much more. This treatment of concepts makes the project into a kind of computer game, and this impression is reinforced by the artist's penchant for the stylistics of quests. Bee Flowers's gender project is saturated with philosophical threats, contentious issues, and many implicit quotes (eg, a light installation by Jenny Holzer reading "You are a victim of the rules by which you live.")
His desire to say everything at once leaves an aftertaste of unfocused youthful protest. The most important statement is easily grasped, though - the repressed and poor, having obtained power, automatically become aggressive, since they remain part of a global system of violence.
In "Liberation!" one feels the struggle of feminism itself, with the constructions of the past era - a sort of inner disassembly. Feminism is not simply the eradication of latent sexism for smart males (as post-lacanian feminists can easily explain,) but a space for a genuinely meaningful critique of modern society, various politicians, capital and power.