ANNA JERMOLAEWA
KURVENREICH
2002
Female eroticism and/or sexuality is skillfully re-navigated in “Kurvenreich” (“Curvy”), a 3-minute video loop from 2002. Here, in a sequence of tightly and beautifully edited sequence of fragments, a little toy red sports car is seen navigating the curves of a woman’s body (the artist’s, perchance?), racing across a corporeal landscape which is as objectified as it is sensuous. The only sound element is the friction of the toy car’s wheels as it moves across the skin’s surface. It is almost as if the car becomes a mapping device of this woman’s body, whose face is never revealed; like a pencil drawing in space, the car articulates the line of the corpus, as if to suggest a sculptural entity. With her trademark light touch, Jermolaewa humorously interrogates a commonplace cultural trope: the sexualization of the automobile (i.e., men ‘riding’ curvaceously sexy sport-cars), or, in the case of car racing, a high-velocity extension of male power (the mobile phallus). In this elegantly constructed video, the red toy sports car might also be construed as the symbolic substitute of the man’s body. And, as the toy car also represents the world of children and play, the introduction of this sign of ‘innocence’ triggers the possibility of other disturbing connotations.
© Text by Joshua Decter, Playing Along with Anna, in: Catalogue: Anna Jermolaewa Big Sister / The Five Year Plan, Wien 2002.