Contrary to the woman’s natural affinity for dark, enclosed spaces—for a womb-house that creates the future, or for a house or a room of one’s own—Vesna Stefanovska bypasses the prenatal space of emptiness. Here, emptiness is interpreted by the artist in conjunction with fullness, and this becomes her only mode of operation, in the same way that black is perceived as the body of the light beam. Her installation Window is composed of aluminum window frames scattered throughout the exhibition space. The dispersion of the gaze in all directions reformulates stereotypes of the human home as a strictly formatted, self-contained unit and expands the notion of a room of one’s own.

What she suggests—ingeniously and metonymically—is meant to demonstrate the liberation of the female gaze, traditionally directed inward and downward, thus offering it its maximum elasticity. Through the frame, as a restrictive yet transparent structure, she succeeds in achieving the emancipation of female introversion (in contrast to the theories of Schopenhauer, Freud, and Bataille). The interrelation between the public and the suspended frames allows viewers to communicate with one another through the work. This implies a process which, on another level, diverges from the centripetal force of the home, conceived as an introverted nucleus.

Among the most delicate aspects of female sensitivity—and one of the causes of its interiorization—is the male gaze directed at the female body. Expressions such as “seeing touch,” “touching gaze,” or “the eye as an extension of touch” capture the difference between male and female sensory experience. The eye that undresses the other, in Vesna Stefanovska’s work Absence, takes on traditionally male prerogatives. By reproducing the movements of eyes appearing across multiple screens, the artist creates a body made of visual organs.

By reinventing the human eye as an independent organ—a phallic symbol—she is able to present it as a weapon against the aggressiveness of the male gaze.

Sonja Abadzieva