#onchain
About this series
Beauty standards push woman into changing themselves, instead of vice versa.
Employing a satiric wit, Ultra Venus by photo artist Viola Rama presents a bizarre catalogue of self-portraits, in which the artist wears selected props, tools and devices, designed to pamper and to improve the body's appearance and functionality, such as wigs, compression corsets, body shapers, anti-wrinkle masks, eye massagers and many more.
About the self-portrait Ultra Venus #12, where she is wearing a facial lifting hammock, Rama states herself: “it sounds weird, it looks weird, and who knows what it does.”
The spectacle of the female body, disguised and transformed through the addition of non-organic components, is used to deconstruct representations of femininity and demystify the traditional relationship between beauty and pain.
Interview
The opening image above showcases a self-portrait featuring a claustrophobic Viola Rama wearing an eye massager, supporting bra, padded hips butt shaper, lips mask and anti-wrinkle silicone chest patches. It sounds like this products are not part of a person but something abstract. How did you develop your idea and concept for this series and what was your motivation to start this project?
I started developing the concept behind the project back in 2015, while I was working on my dissertation on the topic of the cult of beauty in contemporary culture. We live in societies that value our appearance more than everything else, imposing harmful expectations and standards on what the female body should be. We are constantly manipulated and seduced into subjecting ourselves to an endless stream of uncomfortable practices in the name of being beautiful and becoming the “best version of ourselves.” During my online research I stumbled upon an infinite series of advertisements for beauty products that came with the unrelenting promise of improving your skin, your appearance and consequently–but rather unrealistically–every aspect of your life. Products designed to improve our body are generally bizarre-looking, and once you wear them, they tend to make you look like some sort of strange creature. This contradictory peculiarity was my primary point of inspiration and the reason why I decided to subvert the purpose they were created for: they were made to create beauty, I used them to generate a grotesque and often disturbing version of myself.
As you mention it, why did you choose to make this project in the form of self-portraits?
I use self-portraiture as a way to address my own perception of being in the world as a woman and the reality of being alive in a female body that is highly scrutinized in every social interaction. However, in many ways, my projects are not about revealing myself, as I use masks and props to conceal my identity, teetering between the artificiality and authenticity of my own femininity. I definitively prefer to transform myself completely before the camera, masquerading my appearance to create eccentric characters, in complete contraposition to the persona I present to the world in my daily life.
You once said, that in the emergent social contexts of a digitized and globalizing world, human bodies are constantly monitored and transformed through their interactions with technology. Can you outline this thought?
We live in a time of unprecedented technological advancements that are affecting and transforming the meaning of humanity and the interconnections between the human body and technology. We integrate our bodies and identities with sensors and devices that are changing the way we interact with the world, materializing the desire to transcend the limitations of our physical bodies and bringing to life the ideal of merging machine with organism in our relentless pursuit of immortality.
Which song describes your series Ultra Venus best?
Björk - Army Of Me
What/who are some of the inspirations and influences that fuel your work?
I draw inspiration from the work of artists like Cindy Sherman, Hannah Wilke, Gillian Wearing, Lee Bul, Chris Cunningham and many more.
What are your current and future projects?
I am doing preliminary research for a project that addresses posthumanizm, cyborg theory and their links with the twisted perception of women’s bodies in our society.
Artist Bio
Viola Rama is a visual artist based between London and Italy. Rama works with a multidisciplinary approach, exploring themes of femininity, identity and gender politics, often using humor as a tool of social commentary. She studied fine art, photography and graphic design, and she creates artworks that examine the multiplicity of female identity, using bold, hallucinatory color palettes with a cynical, funny view of culture and society.
Photographer: Viola Rama
Twitter: @violarama_
Instagram: @violaorama
OpenSea: Ultra Venus
Photos copyright Viola Rama
DRAWLIGHTS | 1/1 – one post/one photographer, weekly. Off-chain and on-chain. By Peter Nitsch, lens-based artist, a member of Jenny Metaverse, RawDAO and lifetime Member of the Royal Photographic Society of Thailand.
Want a bigger dose of blockchain photography? My friends at PhotoVerso have been bringing the space its weekly news. Visit them here and subscribe for weekly rollups, artist interviews, editorial pieces and more.