Valentina Butumović: Snake Bites
Opening: Thursday, January 29th at 8 PM
The exhibition is open to visitors from Monday to Thursday during the gallery’s working hours from 17:00 to 20:00
Club Kocka Gallery, Youth Center Split, Ulica Slobode 28
Prior to shedding their skin, snakes experience a period of visual disturbance, their eyes appearing milky blue as a special subdermal lubricant coats the inner skin to protect the snake during the shedding process. The lubricant is a filter that shields the eyes while also rendering the snake temporarily blind. During this “pre-shed” period, the entire body of the snake may lose color or darken as it approaches the shed and the snake is called “opaque”
– Sophie Strand, Becoming Opaque: Ecdysis, Vision, and Shedding Selves
In the shadowy genealogy of Western culture, the history of women’s subjectivity is often laced with venom. From the coiled serpent in the Garden of Eden, through misogynistic fin-de-siècle fantasies, to the corpse-paint of underground black metal culture, a woman seeking knowledge and autonomy has consistently been depicted as monstrous – a cold-blooded creature, intimately associated with the reptilian. Valentina Butumović’s exhibition titled Snake Bites does not shy away from such depictions. On the contrary, she bites at their vital tissues and corrodes, distorts and appropriates them, transforming instruments of demonization into tools of emancipation.
The title of the exhibition serves as a semantic nexus bringing together theology, technology and counter-cultural physicality. On a symbolic level, it evokes the Snakebite piercing – a type of double piercing of the lower lip popular in alternative 2000s culture, meant to resemble snake fangs, transforming the inherent vulnerability of one’s face into an outward sign of danger and resistance. On a technical level, biting is also a key step in intaglio printmaking, where an acid is applied to corrode metal plates. The artist puts the actual print matrices on display – zinc and copper plates referred to in the technical jargon of the craft as clichés and stereotypes. Approaching these terms in a literal sense, Butumović crafts a powerful metaphor: the acid which corrodes the metal is analogous to the corrosive disintegration of social stereotypes about women. These metal “scars” are affixed to both wood and leather, materials that invoke, in the context of Black ecology (as described by Gruppo di Nun), a “Gothic rebellion” – a vision of Nature not as a benevolent mother figure, but a dark and untamable force, hostile to civilizational norms of purity and control. A massive flexible tube meanders through the exhibition space – an industrial-age simulacrum of the serpent’s body – engendering a sense of unease, of physical constriction and latent threat.
If metal plates are the bones of this exhibition, then wax and leather are its flesh. Following in the tradition of the Anatomical Venus sculptures – 18th century wax figures displaying female anatomy, their bodies splayed open for the edification of men – the artist uses wax to create a state of suspended fluidity. Macro-photography of snake skins mid-moult (ecdysis) illustrates the moment of “becoming opaque”. It is a stage of temporary blindness which the artist recognizes, along the same line of thought as the author Sophie Strand, as a state of necessary incubation – a locus of creative turbulence and polysemy, forging a new body.
The auditory component of the installation, created in cooperation with Nicolas Clerson, further amplifies the atmosphere of “sonic monstrosity”. Exploring her complex relationship with the electric guitar, the artist creates feedback loops of noise and dissonance, refusing to conform to harmonic structure. The sonic landscape is anchored in degraded fragments of the audio performance of The Snow Queen (Jugoton), in which the voice of the titular queen – a figure of glacial autonomy – echoes the contemporary witch, aesthetically akin to the dark ambient project Aghast.
For Valentina Butumović, thesnake bite is therefore not merely a lethal venom, but rather a pharmakon – a substance which is at once poison and antidote, an inoculation shot of knowledge and power. It is an alchemical process wherein the lead of misogyny is transformed into the gold of resistance. The exhibition does not attempt to cleanse the monster or make it more palatable; it inhabits its very skin at precisely the moment when it grows too tight, inviting the viewer to bear witness as it is finally shed.
Natasha Kadin
Valentina Butumović (Pula, 1994) graduated from the New Media department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. During and after her studies she had the opportunity to participate in various international art projects, residencies and exchanges. After acquiring her MA, she relocated to Lithuania where she continued to hone her craft working at the Nida Art Colony educational center for interdisciplinary art. She has shown her work in group exhibitions as well as independently, and she currently works and collaborates with fellow artists in Croatia and France. In her work, Butumović draws on inter-media translation with the aim of exploring the body as a kind of archive and sediment. The body is positioned as both subject and medium through which the boundaries of the private and public, the self and the other, the human and inhuman, are negotiated.
CURATOR: Natasha Kadin
NMG TEAM: Karla Čudina, Natasha Kadin, Vedran Perkov, Antonela Radun, Jelena Rogošić
TECHNICAL SUPPORT & MASTERING: Nicolas Clerson
TRANSLATION: Ivan Berecka
DOCUMENTATION: Jelena Rogošić
INSTALLATION / SETUP: Valentina Butumović, Nicolas Clerson, Antonela Radun
PROMOTION: Antonela Radun
DONORS: Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, City of Split
MAVENA IS SUPPORTED BY: Kultura Nova Foundation
SPECIAL THANKS: KUM, MKC, PDM, Sarah Toscano
DESIGN: Mladen Luketić
PRINT: Kopiring
