Fifty / Fifty
2013
00:00/00:00
The work is based on my conversation with one of ‘Russian brides’, whose identity I promised to protect. The title refers to her ’50/50’ wish of moving to the UK. A hand-made unfinished embroidered tapestry (with a needle purposely left in it) is based on a photograph I took to depict her idea of a man she was looking for (with a house and a car). The male figure used in the tapestry is one of the first results of my
Google search of ‘an average British man’. The technique I used, cross-stitching, was a widely spread and up until the second part of the 20th century was mostly used by working class women to decorate domestic cloths for daily use or a dowry, or by middle-class women for their own pleasure and pastime. Also, cross-stitches refer to the pixels, which are the basis for any picture uploaded and existed online nowadays.
As an artist, I did hard labour of embroidering during six months, thus, I was able to relate to the sacrifice and labour this woman had to put into her immigration process, about which her story narrates in a sound piece accompanied to the tapestry. The sound piece is a restaged woman’s monologue, which reveals the complexity of her marriage to an British man and dilemmas she faces on a journey to her dream.