Voluptious performance artist disrobing (0:36)

Lustration / Ablution №7

Original was uploaded on 2024-01-30

Seventh part of the long-term performance, planned to be held 88 times. During the Zurich Art Weekend on May 2023, organized by Kyiv Art Week. Mediators: Eugene Bereznitsky, Maria Vtorushina, Olena Iegorova. Zurich, Switzerland, 2023.

During the «Lustration / Ablution» Maria Kulikovska is in the bathtub together with her sculpture-copy and she lustrates herself. She washes her body and face – she is extracting a sacrifice, thus cleaning up from traumas. «I wash my face with my own hands, I brush my hair, I peel off my soap skin, I wipe myself and scrub. – Maria Kulikovska explains. – I watch the lustration on my image and the image of women in the patriarchal context. Washing and cleaning by my own hands is a reference to invisible women labour, which the society imagines as something beautiful, normal and nature, woven into the skin of every woman, but which also quietly dissolves her».

The soap, which became the base for the creation of the sculpture-cast of the artist’s body, is a metaphorical-conflict material. This material is used in military plants for the testing of weapons of mass destruction, because it has the same density as the human body, it is also translucent, so the soap is served as an ideal platform for selecting the best killer weapon.

Kulikovska’s wish to clear herself from the pain, the political conflicts, discrimination, difficulties and chaos of this world was transformed to art therapy, to lustration of herself through sculptural copy of her own body.

mariakulikovska.net/en
https://www.instagram.com/mkov.studio.hybrid.art/