YANINA WEBER

Woman giving birth to herself

Yanina Weber's universe is peopled with childhood ghosts that can't be seen but felt. The ghost of loneliness, the ghost of anguish, the ghost of strangeness, those invisible ones make the child eyes wide open. The name of the one on the prints is Juanita.  

The doll Juanita, a naive metamorphosis of the artist, is searching where the odd comes from, all alone, lost in a gloomy universe on a flowery wall print. This former series edited as a book print is a prelude to contemporary wall installations.

Yanina Weber prints are a long narration, wandering among ex-votos or herbs in The garden of the dark death throes . Sometimes losing limbs, having them bound to threads like a puppet, a childish thought that one thought has been during childhood. Little stories of little girl echo within Annette Messager and Louise Bourgeois art works. Those two artists have torn apart the body of the woman. Maybe they act like that to appropriate the body before integrating it back.

« No one is born a woman, but is becoming one" said Simone de Beauvoir . Fear of becoming somebody else mostly belongs to women. Men do not change much, while woman have intimate and mysterious metamorphosis one after the other. When occurs a gap in between the inner me and society, there is much more involved in the outside (superficiality, celebrity lives, all the bullshit of the medias). Clearly they are forgetting what is happening inside (feeling, thinking, meditating and dreaming). For this matter maybe some women alienate their own body and spirit, becoming hysterical, changing the outside pretend-acting on the inside. Feminity for Yanina Weber happens to be else, much more sensitive and authentic. She has created inhabited altuglass boxes. They preserve in a museum state the delicate dresses in japanese paper, relics of a woman's life. The red maiden dress called " The garden of the red death throes" and the wedding dress "Something eats and drinks me" is white with printed ants on it.

Yanina 's sensitivity to the feminine condition is possibly Latin because of her Argentinian nationality, one feels like a woman since childhood, without ambiguity, instead of Northern women who become adult when they start working.

In the print, «  Juanita's games  », a puppet is losing small letters from her vagina like blood. Bleeding for a woman is not remarkable but can't be denied nor despised but told. That is the essence of a woman. And Yanina is telling it with humour and accuracy. She plays with feminity like with a doll showing her articulations and functioning, exactly like a child playing.