FETISH

FETISH
4-5 FEBRUARY 2023
MAMA
10 GREATOREX Avenue
LONDON
E1 5NF

MAMA is very pleased to existing ‘Fetish‘, its inaugural team exhibition consisting of 11 intergenerational and global females artists. This exhibition is a celebration that seeks to reframe the ‘fetish’ as one thing equally skilled and found by girls.

Although ‘fetish’ is however usually seen from the area of masculine sexuality, we open and untangle the idea of the fetish to a broader experiential spectrum of actual physical pleasure and iconography – through vision, contact, flavor, smell, even sound. In that sense, a fetish results in being equally: a drive for an embodied condition, stimulated by aesthetic and sensory stimuli like cloth, apparel, meals and of study course, nudity and the overall body, but also an idealised/sanctified entity, practically to the point of parody.

‘Fetish has constantly been a term of sinister pedigree, … discursively promiscuous and theoretically suggestive’ wrote William Pietz in his anthropological analyze of its historical past. And while fetish as a sexualised notion commenced to crystallise at the finish of the 19th century, the unchanging and transhistorical factors of its meaning are irreducible materiality and inherently problematic relationship to ladies.

Greatly explored by the Surrealists, fetish grew to become almost site specific to the woman human body – a trope that not only furthered the social objectification and subjugation of gals, but crucially, which undermined the autonomy of the determine of a female artist. The association of ‘woman’ with male fantasies which permeated so much of Surrealist get the job done, stood in stark contrast to the female artists’ need to have for inventive flexibility and expression. A construct of the Surrealist fetish, ladies were thus witnessed as internet sites or objects of want, somewhat than agential subjects, equally capable of enduring it.

Famously theorised by psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, fetish was for a extensive time a phenomenon observed just about solely in gentlemen and by adult men. Just one of the very first artists to break the tradition was Meret Oppenheim whose Dejeuner en Fourrure (1936) became a spectacle and community fixation to the point of turning into a fetishised object in by itself.

The artists showcased in the display continue on the custom of breaking with the stereotype of the hypersexualised transgressive fetish, suggesting that it extends far past into the realms of sensory delight and aesthetic fulfilment. In our tactic, we stick to the notion of fetish as imbued in materiality the fetish is actual physical, embodied and by consequence, basically experiential, including a phenomenological lens to the exploration of satisfaction and want.

©2023 MAMA

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