Anastasia Rydlevskaya
Veiled / Unveiled

Confessions of a mask[1]

Having survived a not very exciting post-colonial episode in its history, linked to an ethnographic obsession with displaying it as a relic and decorative object satisfying the desire for contemplation, the mask returns as a socio-cultural phenomenon, drawing into play a research apparatus of sometimes very divergent disciplines. It is studied not only by cultural anthropologists and philosophers of (non)identity, but also by semiologists and psychoanalysts of social communication phenomena.

This renaissance of interest in the mask is due to its ontic ambivalence, encoded in its cultural genotype as a dialectic of concealing and revealing. ‘Unmasking’ is irrevocably encoded in the mechanism of opacity, which, but perhaps only by virtue of some ‘primordial baptism’ lost in the mists of time, has been assigned to it in a way.

The intriguing work of the Belarusian artist presented here takes us to the very centre of this ambivalence, while also touching on areas quite distant from what we traditionally associate with the visual arts, meaning their desperate narrowing dictated by the audience.

Appearing in various configurations, the masks reveal and obscure the artist’s personal situation, which we have neither the right nor the competence to analyse. Clad in masks, deities and idols, partly friendly, partly hostile and demonic, they seem to have magical self-therapeutic powers. Their task is to keep in check and tame the fears associated with the indelible contingency of the body and its transience.

Anastasia organically combines them with the elements of earth, animals and vegetation, which is why the term ‘chthonic’ does not seem entirely out of place when describing her work.

Many of her canvases feature a strongly emphasised motif of non-binarity, introducing the contemporary theme of gender indefinability, which is another manifestation of the phenomenon of the mask as a refusal to treat sexuality, especially female sexuality, in an arbitrary, essentialist manner, and the need to consider it in terms of non-identity and freedom of choice.

The theme of non-binarity did not appear yesterday. It was already present in what is recklessly referred to as prehistory. The difference is that in today’s new edition, it is strongly intertwined with the emergence of the political subject of female autonomy and its integration into the sphere of social relations. In an intriguing way, Rydlevskaya builds a bridge between eras, synthesising them.

Rather intuitively than intentionally, she enters into dialogue with the work of Marie Delcourt, a Belgian expert on Greek culture and mythology, who, also referring to archaic traditions, describes the Sphinx as a female monster with reversed gender characteristics, attacking and raping young men. The woman with a penis in Anastasia’s paintings is also a distant, ironic reference to the myth of the ancient phallic mother, recreated and reconstructed in Freudian analysis of childhood sexuality, in which the mother appears to the little boy as a person robbed of her phallus by his father.

The theft of the phallus, especially in Lacan’s later reinterpretation, is the most audacious symbolic theft of the 20th century, dwarfing famous bank robberies and the theft of great works of art from museums. In his Seminar on The Purloined Letter, Lacan equates women, castration and truth, writing about the latter that it is a woman emerging naked from a well, but visible only from the waist up due to the anxious men and guardians of morality holding her back. Re-phallusization, which in the contemporary imaginary of women’s struggle is a subversive and twisted metaphor for the strategy and practice of restoring women’s rights, resonates enigmatically in Anastasia’s actions. Beyond this context, however, a personal statement emerges in them, one that cannot be reduced to any common discourse.

Andrzej Wajs

 

[1]
A reference to the title of the famous novel by Japanese writer Yukio Mishima (translated by Meredith Weatherby, 1958), whose narrator, a young gay man, describes his first sexual initiations using the symbol of a mask as a veil, revealing at the same time that something is being hidden from the eyes of others, and thus also confessing.