HYSTERIA

Dunya Zakharova presented multidisciplinary project ‘Hysteria’
in Art4, Moscow. Installation works, sculptures, video, music, drawings, embroider, painting and performance art combined into one.

The mythos created by the artist were examined under a laboratory-bright light. Drawing and sublimating from her own Personal life experiences, she builded a new narrative, sourced from pagan roots, psychiatric disorders and sexual perversions.

The name of the exhibit, ‘Hysteria’ comes from the Greek ‘hysteria’ (uterus), which serves here as a metaphor for the issues of female
sexuality and the stigma that mental illness still bears today.
The visible gendered naming of this antiquated medical term was
attributed to the source of this illness — the assumed ‘wrong movements of the uterus’ within the body, which was connected
to the pressure it supposedly put on other internal organs.
These imagined spasms could be felt in the exhibit, as visitors
will find themselves inside a four-meter installation, depicting
the female body.

The centrepiece of the exhibition was the uterus as a living
being. Once you enter, you are enveloped by her softness.
The heartbeat of the mother, a soft singing in Yakut language,
and a hypnotically-gentle video on the monitor put you to sleep
and carry you away to that unconscious time, when we were yet
to be born.

Magical charms were strewn across the entire space, helping the shaman-artist during her ritual. The fabric, filled with synthetic fibre, turned into soft sculpture work, firmly standing on its feet.

The video was created in collaboration with the artist and composer Alina Petrova. The action, recorded on tape and then digitized
into our reality, documents some form of ritual, where a body interacts with objects to become their part, their continuation. Much like A shaman, the artist becomes a mediator between his own imagined world and the modern reality.

During the video, one can hear the traditional algys (and appeal
to the spirits by a shaman during his ritual) in Yakut language.
The rapidly-disappearing native tongue slowly becomes an abstract noise, which carries the observer into the void of an altered state.

Installation view

Detail of ‘Untitled’, 180 x 130 x 80 cm, fabric, acrylic, polyester fiber fill ,embroidery, 2019

‘Untitled, 70 x 140 x 50 cm, fabric, acrylic, polyester fiber fill, 2019

Detail of ‘Untitled’, 60 x 160 x 60 cm, fabric, acrylic, polyester fiber fill, soil, flowers, 2019