Melanie Bonajo

Melanie Bonajo
Night Soil – Economy of Love, 2015
Single channel video, colour, sound, 32΄ 46΄΄
Courtesy of the artist and AKINCI, Amsterdam

Melanie Bonajo’s work explores issues of queerness, community, equality and body politics, while challenging the traditional notions that divide nature, people, and technology. Night Soil – Economy of Love (2015) focuses on a Brooklyn-based movement of female sex workers who look at their work as a way for women to reclaim power in a male­dominated pleasure zone, their mission being to rearrange sexual conventions and ideas about intimacy. Playful, sensual, inspired by feminism and the liberation movements of the 1960s, the film’s vivid erotic imagery speaks about the ‘wisdom of femininity’ and reveals expectations surrounding gender roles.

In a world where a swipe to the right on a smartphone can grant access to supermarket sex, where social media tend to create an alternate form of loneliness, and where we are increasingly disconnected from the physical world, Bonajo questions the complex relationships that exist within them. Through their videos, performances, photographs and installations, they study subjects related to how technological advances and commodity-based pleasures increase feelings of alienation, removing a person’s sense of belonging, while they examine people’s shifting relationship with each other and nature and trie to understand existential questions by reacting on our domestic situation, the influence of technology on society, concepts of home, gender and attitudes towards value.

Biography

Melanie Bonajo studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam and completed residencies at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (2009–10) and at ISCP, New York (2014). In 2022 they represented the Netherlands at the 59th Venice Biennale. Recent exhibitions include the Shanghai Biennale (2021/22), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2020), Palais de Tokyo (performance, 2019), RIBOCA1 1st International Riga Biennial of Contemporary Art, Manifesta 12, Palermo and Haus der Kunst, Munich (all 2018), Frankfurter Kunstverein, Tate Modern, London and Prix de Rome, Amsterdam (2017).

https://www.instagram.com/melanie_bonajo

 

 

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