Nina Dotti — P.M.S. — Princess.Mother.Superwoman. — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 22 → July 28, 2012

Becoming a woman and wondering what a woman is are two essentially different things. I would go even further — it’s because one doesn’t become one that one wonders and, up to a point, to wonder is the contrary of becoming one.

Jacques Lacan, Séminaire III, Les psychoses (Qu’est-ce qu’une femme), 1981

If Simone de Beauvoir was the first woman who dared to ask, in all its complexity, the question: " What does it mean to be a woman? " and if to that question, she replied, “ One is not born, but rather, becomes a woman ” we must not conclude, as Lacan’s above quote seems to suggest, that a woman only truly becomes a woman as soon as she fails to reflect on her condition. Very much on the contrary, it would seem more fair to say, along the lines of what Nina Dotti suggests through her creations, that it is only when a woman can maintain a critical relationship with the clichés (or the ‘genders’, as Judith Butler would say) that are imposed on “la” femme by our Western societies, that she can become a truly free woman, in other words, a woman capable of living in a non-conflictual mode with the complexity of her condition.

This is, without doubt, the reason for which Nina Dotti not only produced, for her next exhibition, a series of photographs presenting the image of a Barbie Humanizer authoritatively asserting her ability to be all the women she is supposed to be — Barbie Humanizer is simultaneously a femme fatale, a housewife, and a business woman — but she also saw fit to add to this image of the woman a series of sculptures representing — in the form of golden scales — the myriad unconscious balancing acts underlying such a representation.

For it is clear that for a woman to reach her full potential, she must not only model her behavior after an all-powerful woman, but must also understand that this omnipotence can only be attained if she allows herself to harmonize, in her heart of hearts, the array of tendencies that composes her being.