Katerina Moschou
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28th June - 29th September 2024
The automotive industry is not a woman-friendly space. From the design stage of a new car to everyday participation in traffic to the sexist, belittling verbal layer. The risk of injury in a car crash is higher in women than in men because of the shorter height, they -women, sit in more upright and closer to the steering wheel. That’s why they are at risk of head injuries caused by airbag. In addition the women’s neck muscles are weaker than those of men, and they are more likely to injure their arms, legs, joints, feet and abdomens. Until recently these differences were almost completely ignored during crash tests. Although dummies that reproduce female anatomy are used, but their construction comes from 70’s and 80’s and do not reflect the specificity of the female body quite well. It is only just in the last year and a half that more refined phantoms have been used, considering the statistical damage to a woman’s body in an accident translating the results into their construstion.
“How to drive” has its beginning in this world so alien to the female body, the border of which Katerina Moschou crosses on several levels. The portal to it is the artist’s father’s car repair shop - a space she has known for years but that has always seemed distant. Staying there, photographing cars, staying close to them, she has crossed the border of a community other than her own, and created her own connections in it. Thanks to touch she has become, in a sense, one with the devices and materials previously unavailable.
The entire space of the exhibition is a reproduction of this gesture, it is tactile. The photographs and objects also build an arrangement which plays with what is visible and what is invisible. The lines and shapes make up synthetic sketches of car silhouettes, but the context corporeality is still present. While driving, the person driving the car repeats a specific sequence of gestures almost unconsciously. Her body fuses with the elements of the vehicle’s equipment which determine the movements but are also designed to correspond with the shape of the human silhouette. The body in the car is inscribed in a small closed space, where it performs a rhythmical dance. Moschou has translated it into a sequence in a photobook. It was developed in the exhibition space with the use of a slide projector. Its mode of operation, repetition, and image overlapping and even the sounds it makes bring to mind what happens in the car. Just like a mixture of specific synthetic fragrances present at the exhibition. All this together reminds us that driving a car is a complex relationship between what is visible, desirable and disappearing.
Text by Paweł Bąkowski
This project was co-financed
from the budget of Lower Silesia Voivodeship
Curator: Paweł Bąkowski
Visual identification, motion: Olga Krzywiecka, Paweł Bąkowski
Accompanying program: Aleksandra Tews
Translations: Marek Balicki
Digital prints: QPrint
Exhibition realization: Michał Perucki
Honorary patronage: Embassy of Greece in Warsaw
Exhibition partner: Mood Scent Bar
Media patrons: Zoetrope Athens, Kwartalnik FOTOGRAFIA,
Contemporary Lynx, TVP3 Wroclaw, Radio RAM, Radio Wrocław, Radio Wrocław Kultura,
Miesięcznik Odra, Pismo Artystyczne Format