Alex Mari: Our heads stuffed with lies, Her Belly Full of Ice

About

Our heads stuffed with lies, Her Belly Full of Ice is Alex Mari’s first survey exhibition spanning the past decade highlighting conceptual performances documented solely for photo, video, text or sound (non-live). A trickster, her brown body in a sequined gold prom dress pulled up to her hips, her genitalia partially covered by a hemp loin cloth, hands and face painted white, and a belly full of ice ... disorients us by disorienting herself.

The title piece Her Belly Full of Ice is appropriated from George Orwell’s novel 1984. The full quote reads: “He had imagined her a fool like all the rest of them, her head stuffed with lies and hatred, her belly full of ice.” Unlike the protagonist’s fear of rejection from women; here, the artist plays with the reality of that rejection, a belly full of ice—an exhaustive embrace of freedom from (not of) sex and desire. Using decolonized sensoria–a literal bag of ice to numb her womb and infused with Deleuze and Guattari concepts, the trickster becomes a body without organs. With an abdomen made hollow, she is given permission to deterritorialize and reterritorialize her own body, her own modality for sex, desire or reproduction and ultimately her own creation.

Mari’s pieces in this exhibition focus on re-ownership of self outside of societal expectations. The work emphasizes the language of the body in conversation with a dangerous societal standard. They reclaim constructs such as race, gender, sexuality, orientation, and status. Each piece introduces a narrative that is irrevocably humxn—instituting decolonized desire, habit, memory, grief, history; a reimagined identity to the viewer.