Editor’s note: This piece is intended for mature audiences.
In this two-minute video, artist Dana Dal Bo reenacts poses associated with hysteria in the late 19th century. The piece was posted online on amateur porn and “tubesites”. The work is complicated by its publication as web users attempted to place the artist’s actions in the video within a pornographic context. The following screenshots (provided by the artist) are a selected representation of comments to the video.
Artist’s Thematic Statement:
The piece Marginal Consent is a re-creation of a specific time in history relocated in a contemporary context. The early photographic images of female hysterics are significant to both technology and sex. These images were taken at the turn of the last century, when psychology was emerging as a science, and the first cameras were becoming readily available. There is a definite sexual under/overtone in many of the images, particularly when we consider that due to the limitations of early photography, the patients needed to hold the poses still for several seconds in order to document them; thus there are elements of voyeurism and (solicited?) performance. (Didi-Huberman) Fast forward 100+ years and many of the poses and postures depicted in those early photographs can be found in contemporary pornography. The gesture of re-enacting the poses associated with hysteria, re-positioning them on porn sites and collecting the comments left by viewers, serves to flip the power structure of the tubesite in question. – Dana Dal Bo
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Dana Dal Bo currently lives and works in Montrèal, Canada. Her work moves in and between photo, video, textiles, performance, and the net; it is a fusion of these mediums with her diverse background in psychology and modeling. She draws inspiration from reality TV, surveillance practices, the history of medicine and psychology, infomercials and pop culture. Themes of contemporary anxiety, voyeurism, exhibitionism, narcissism and feminism dominate her work.
She has exhibited extensively both locally and internationally. She was part of the exhibition Si02 “The Reason of Fragility” at of the National Gallery of Albania (2015). She has been invited as an exhibiting artist to both the 21st (Vancouver 2015) and 22nd (Hong Kong 2016) editions of ISEA – The International Symposium for Electronic Art. Her textile work was included in the International Textile Biennale (Mexico 2012). In 2015 she was commissioned by the International Motion Festival of Cyprus to create work for their recent Biennale. Her videos have been screened internationally including New York, Bulgaria, Cuba, and the Ukraine.
You can view more of Dana Dal Bo’s work at www.danadalbo.com.
