Description
OD Photo Prize 2024 | Judges’ Pick
Selected by Maria Lax
Freelance Director & OD Artist
Moník Molinet (b.1989) is a Cuban artist living between Cuba and Mexico. Her training has been multidisciplinary, beginning with classical music and arts studies performing arts at the National School of Arts in Havana. Subsequently she specialised in photography at the Academy of Visual Arts in Mexico City, focusing particularly on portraiture.
Moník’s work is recognised for her feminist activism, addressing issues such as masculinities, body positivity, romantic love and criticism of objectification of the female body. Among his most personal work, the body of work where he addresses the self-portrait, an exercise that he has sustained for more than 10 years as a search and scrutiny of a human identity beneath androcentric social and cultural constructs.
Artist Statement | “Self-portrait photography project in which I recreate family scenes in the domestic space to create a non-existent memory for me: the relationship with my grandmothers and grandfathers. Some of the scenes were conceived from the experiences of my friends and others, from the projection of a personal desire, thus investigating the limits between life and representation, between the natural and the performative.
How is this specific relationship visually and emotionally constructed? How is memory constructed, how can intimacy be created visually? To what extent can art, representational resources and visual language create a powerful visual memory, a feeling that replaces a lack?
We held a casting in Havana calling for more than 100 people, we selected 9 actors and actresses to play my grandmothers and grandfathers. We recreated 29 scenes in their homes. The staging was articulated with the resource of breaking the fourth wall or “Verfremdungseffekt” created by Bertolt Brecht, which focuses on ideas and decisions and not on trying to immerse the viewer in an illusory world.“ — Moník Molinet
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