“For the first five years of our marriage, your father didn’t know I had hair down there.”
2017
video
12:35
text by Alina Kleytman
3D by Darja Veshtsk
translation by Jessica Zihrovich and Kristina Kuzmich
soundtracrk – Pierre Bachelet for Emmanuelle
CHOICE shows a dramatic episode from a life of a woman, whose life is full of doubt and fear, because she has completely lost herself in the struggle to meet men’s desires.
The long title of the work stands for the need to meet men’s expectations. This need is brought up and passed on from generation to generation women.
The uncontrollably sprout hair through the stocking symbolizes the natural feminine power.
For the first five years of our marriage, your father didn’t know I had hair down there.
The work thematizes the way power, control, and discrimination manifest in the form of self-discipling involving the most intimate parts of the body and life, and how desire is constructed from wanting to meet requirements.
Researcher and curator Oksana Briukhovetska
Conflict between personal desires and standards, promoted by society unfolds, in an epic drama if not tragedy in the work of Alina Kleytman “For the first five years of our marrige, your father did not know I had hair down there”. Isolated claustrophobic space of this work entangles spectators (mostly viewers) with a web of fears generated by the failure to meet the standard. Fatal spinning web of nylon-revolutionary material, from which the textile industry weaves the ideal shells. But the ideal is always ruthless and requires bloody victims.
curator in Visual Culture Research Center,Fulbright Scholar
Lesia Kulchynska