Julischka Stengele: Fat Femme Furious

About

Moving between installation, performance, sound and photography, FAT FEMME FURIOUSinvestigates role models and ideal body-types. Through this, Stengele understands the body as a space where discursive and normative preconceptions of desire, beauty, health and gender are made manifest, leading to societal processes of inclusion and exclusion. In tackling regimes of the gaze, the tension between looking and being looked-at is brought to the fore. It is the powerful gaze of others that attempts to define and classify us, forming identities and dictating their agency.

Performatively deploying her own body, Stengele focusses on these socio-cultural power structures. An emphasis on the performance of femininity is coupled with queerness and an insurrection against body norms. Stengele unapologetically embodies a counter-project to androcentric principles, practicing a critique directed at societal imbalances and power relations.

The exhibition space becomes a stage for a strong, feminist protest claimed by a body that is at once product and producer of society. Here, the political dimension of that which is labelled 'the personal' is allowed to unfold. Within the exhibition's framework, the body becomes a medium for expressing resistance, agitating as a tool for self-empowerment in the moment where marginalised bodies hold the gaze of others and then consciously return it, projecting back (self-)images and narratives of their own.