Universal woman

The presentation:
You enter a dark room. A wooden object stands in the centre of the room. It is made of a combination of different types of wood - like an art installation -- and that looks a bit like a strange table, only the top of it consists of white liquid. The top measures 1.5 X 1.5 metres, and its height is 60 centimetres.

The audience will stand around the installation and view video art created from portraits of 40 different women. It will be projected from the ceiling onto the pool of liquid. A surround audio system will produce the voice of a woman speaking a monologue, with short musical interludes. The images of these women stand for universal womanhood: women that we can all recognize. The faces change in a variety of artistic ways, the voices are all around you, surrounding you, making the viewer feel like he is standing inside a woman's head and listening to her intimate thoughts. There are different faces, different ages, different backgrounds, but they all have one thing in common: being a Western woman. They all went to school, trained towards a profession, worked in a job and then fell in love with a man and got married, had children... They have lived a life. We ask ourselves a question: What do women think? What do they feel? What do they expect from life? The universal woman evaluates her life so far: Is her husband aware of the sacrifices that she has made? Does he know what she gave up? She is happy, but at the same time looking back on the first years of their partnership. These women find themselves in a different phase of their lives: some at the start of a professional career, some are having their first child, some are already thinking about children leaving the house.

Many women had to give up their youthful expectations of having careers and professional lives, in order to accommodate their husbands and their families. They are happy, but at this point in their life they start to wonder whether they are getting what they had envisaged out of life. They see their husbands go to work, leaving them to deal with the kids and their problems. And when the woman has a job too, there is no time left for hobbies or the other things she used to like doing. We all recognize it, we can all relate to it as men, women, husbands and wives.

This exhibition is about allowing men to physically and mentally get inside a woman's head and find out what's there, what they really think about 'their' men (husband, boyfriend, male partner). It's about listening to what she thinks about her life. Is she happy with what she got out of life? Is she satisfied or disappointed? Sharon Mor Yosef & Karim Cherif don't want to create a negative atmosphere, but to show a universal feeling that Western women have. They discovered this by interviewing the 40 women, by asking them to tell them their life stories, their mistakes and triumphs. Now they are sharing it with all Western men and women.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Universal
• woman
• sharon
• mor
• yosef
• what
• women
• want
• need
• video
• art