Produced in collaboration with Bojana Stamenković, “The Kitchen” is a 360 minute performance and installation exploring notions of retraditionalisation and emancipation in a feminist context. Two female performers roleplay words and ideas drawing from text and art theory from the second and third wave, while also preparing food and reading recipes aloud from cookbooks written in the same period.
The outcome of these confused and juxtaposed perspectives on womanhood and femininity generate a chaotic and somewhat absurd situation that is hyper-accentuated by the two concurrent activities—of critical feminist theory alongside a domestic activity gendered conventionally female. The two authors and performers interpret the problems of the social and political position of women posited by these texts. They discuss the labour market as foundational to socialization, and the conditions and space of possible action while roasting a chicken, baking a cake or flattening dough. Screened alongside a food installation in the gallery space where visitors could help themselves, distinctions between recipes and feminist texts become muddled and unclear.
“The Kitchen” deals with the point of transition from the post-war woman as revolutionised hero mother to the retraditionalised, yet sexualised housewife of contemporary post-Communist culture in the Balkans. By confronting these two opposing impulses—between retraditionalisation and emancipation—a confused situation emerges. The disoriented interactions and conditions of the two women becomes an allegory for the contradictory perception of “womanhood” by society at large.