Iva Kontic

“She Under the Plumtree” explores the definition of femininity and the construction of female identity in contemporary society and culture of the Western Balkans. The work focuses on the over-sexualized and sexist representation of women and gender relations within Pop-Folk music which dominates the current musical and cultural scene of the region and, in particular, of Serbia where this music genre and phenomenon originates from. Considered the local mainstream, the Serbian pop-folk repertory outlines a female profile modeled by the strongly patriarchal anthropological tradition from which it was born. The song and musical video-clips portray women as reduced to a stereotype, to a body which is functional, adjusted to what man supposedly desire, while men live a primitive masculinity which coincides with female expectations. This feminine identity constantly reconfirms itself inside the contemporary context through the mis-en-scene of a controversial imaginary in which the female image and body are imprisoned inside a paradoxical representation. The flamboyant pop-folk singers, half-naked and wearing excessive makeup, are constructed to please the male eyes, while the lyrics of their songs narrate indirectly of their social submission. To the songs of the female singers go hand in hand with the male interpreters who sing about the triumph of virility and simultaneously reduce the woman body to an object. Trash, transgression, and vulgarity reflect and correspond to the temperature of the female-male relations that exist within the everyday reality of Serbian and neighboring Balkan societies. In “She Under the Plumtree”, the two artists try to play with and subvert this standardized representation of the female universe and the visual normative through which a woman should indulge the male universe as described through the realm of Pop-Folk. From a vast musical repertory of Serbian pop-folk “patrimony”, several songs are chosen for emblematically describing or emphasizing the modality of the reduced and objectified female.

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She Under the Plumtree is composed of several parts - a series of photographs, a book, a performance and a video installation, which function both as independent works or can be combined in a mixed-media installation.