Opening hours:
Monday - Friday:12am - 6pm
Monday - Friday:12am - 6pm
03 March 2025 > 28 March 2025 You are kindly invited to the opening of the exhibition "My Life is a Hairy Tale" by Lea Culetto on Monday, 3 March at 7 p.m. The exhibition is a part of 26. International Feminist and Queer Festival Red Dawns. Kindly welcome also to the other events of the festival.
Kindly invited also to other events of the 26th International Feminist and Queer festival Red Dawns
Monday, 3 March 2025 at 7 pm.
Alkatraz Gallery, Masarykova 24, 1000 Ljubljana
Free entrance – Mondays until Fridays between noon and 6 pm
In her artistic practice, Lea Culetto explores the influence of social norms on the perception of the female body, focusing on the beauty ideal as a mechanism of control. The project My Life is a Hairy Tale (2023) plays with the meaning of body hair and its social (in)acceptability. By shaping hair into hairstyles embedded in plush objects, it raises the question of whether the stylisation of hair would affect its perception. Through humour and aestheticization of bodily features, she offers a critique of patriarchal standards of appearance.
The artist is interested in what role female characters play and how the female body appears in fairy tales as a symbol of beauty and submission. The motif of the glass shoe through which blue blisters seep in the work entitled My Life is a Hairy Tale (2023) alludes to the hidden implications of these stories, 'made meaningful' in the saying 'One must suffer to be beautiful'. At the same time, the artist explores also the symbolism of hair, which carries meanings in different contexts – from magical properties in folk tales to associations with power and ferocity in ancient myths. Her work titled 1,99 Grams Too Much (2017), which has already been exhibited in the Alkatraz Gallery, returns this time with the same message in a butter dish, with the hair that grew on the author's body over the period of six months found its home.
Some of the exhibited works invite interaction, where visitors explore their relationship to the body and its social markers by touching sensors in e-textiles. The project thus opens up a space for reflection on internalised norms and their deconstruction through artistic expression.
Lea Culetto explores issues of bodily representation in popular culture in a broader context and critically addresses the influence of social expectations on the perception of the female body and its roles. Her work is often rooted in personal experiences, through which she reveals the mechanisms of the internalisation of norms and the feelings of inadequacy that follow. She creates artistic objects, clothing and accessories that thematise bodily processes, often marginalised by the fashion industry and society in general.
In addition to the polycystic ovarian syndrome in the work PCOS (2023), which consists of transfer-printed fertility symbols from different cultures, the artist is also interested in the misrepresentation of menstrual blood, which has until recently been portrayed in advertisements as blue liquid – a symbol of purity and sterility, whilst, simultaneously – in reference to fairy tales – alluding to the idea of the 'blue blood' of nobility and the privilege that derives from it. Wrapped and embroidered in soft furry fabric, the interactive works Ouch!, Blue Blood and Happily Ever After, as well as the transfer-printed works I Could Eat You Up..., .../... (2023) offer a brilliantly clear critique of capitalism, which results in painfully unequal distribution of resources and power among the people. With the help of legends (the prince turned into a frog, the queen as a snake, etc.) and the employment of a barbed wire heart made of plush, which is also a female body, uncannily similar to the Venus of Willendorf, Lea Culetto's works reveal the suffering caused by the disciplining of minds and bodies of all genders in the service of the capitalist 'nobility'.
The artworks in question were presented at the Likovni Salon Gallery last year. The Alkatraz Gallery features them for the audience of the Red Dawns festival, thus protesting against the unrealistic and exploitative demands of consumer society to devour ever new productions, and emphasising through the exhibition that important content is worth revisiting again and again.
Lea Culetto opens up a space for reflection on the freedom to decide on one's own self-image and offers an alternative view of the aesthetics of the body. Her work is not merely critical, but also offers an incarnation of the otherness – using kitsch not only as an artistic expression, but rather as a means of creating a softer, kinder and playful world in which aesthetics embraces and incorporates non-normative forms of beauty and individual expressions.
Lučka Zajc, Ana Grobler, Veronika Rakovec
