“My critical investigations into the socially constituted feminine have always been the basis of my artwork. With motherhood this has become increasingly potent and emerging. From painting to photography, from objects to performance photos, my current position is politically conscious of the need to revise and transform the way we women write and enter the history of art. “

Vestal vestiments/ Vestes de Vestais 1998-2017

Made up of three straitjackets that differentiate each other by the detail of the ornaments: my own hair sewn in each of them forming three different patterns. Photo-performance wearing the straitjackets.

“Vestals were the priestesses in Ancient Rome who worshiped the Roman goddess Vesta. It was an exclusively female priesthood, restricted to six women who would be chosen between the ages of 6 and 10, serving for thirty years. During this period, the vestal virgins were obliged to preserve their virginity and chastity, any attack on these symbols of purity would mean a sacrilege to the Roman gods and therefore also to Roman society. The clothing and hairstyle of the vestal virgins show the importance of chastity and the purity of the vests in their worship. They also demonstrate their special social status within society: as citizens of Rome and as non-members of the family structure that governs that society. ” (Source: Wikipedia)

One day will be the world with its superb impersonality against my extreme individuality as a person, but we will be one/ Um dia será o mundo com sua impersonalidade soberba versus a minha extrema individualidade de pessoa mas seremos um só, 2016

The hybridism between body and nature is the proposal of this series, which seeks to interweave the diversities of meanings, from there, through self-portraits and image overlays. The multiform vegetation, present as another character, is the same – and simultaneously different – that I have been accompanying, throughout the months and years, throughout my existence in its various presentations. Its cycles of germination, death, rebirth – and all the sexual process of which it is constitutive – crosses the body, mirrors and fertilizes it. And vice versa.

This series of self-portraits proposes to highlight the relationship between body and nature and self-representation, in the challenge of establishing resignifications of insubmissible cultural values, in the questioning of identity immobilism in the face of multiple and broader communicative panoramas in digital culture, of infiltrating critical discourses of gender and Diversities of a self that, like nature, is in constant flux. The proposition is to gestate and give birth to such multi-sexual bodies, hermaphrodites, androgynous, indistinct – as to their physical and biological form – and living, seeking to apprehend their needs, autonomies and pleasures. Overlapping images – self-portraits diluted into other forms or the wild flora that composes and transmutes human features – do not do so by plastic innocence. Each visual element there framed discurses an infinite number of words and readings. The veiling / unveiling of women occurs, symbolically, through multiple image overlays – in addition to the actual bridal veil that carries its evident cultural charge – it tries to propose reflections and affirm resistances, or enable visibilities, of its humanity in the facets that Historically, socially and culturally.

This new being affirms – and extends – its condition of subject that holds individual particularities that, at one time or another, hibernate encasulados and then to be transfigured into something beyond, in the form as in the place in which the art, with its constructions imagers possessing of Multiple readings, enables the new and the future.

The unsustainable lightness of being/ A insustentável leveza do ser, 2016

Nylon and glass stocking
In this work I propose ethical / aesthetic reflection on a society that dictates strict rules about ways of being a woman. A fragile and broken “body” splintered into sharp pieces forms under the thin sock in recognizable female silhouette. A cadaverous woman insinuates herself and, in the same way, a shattered child.
The proposal also has a photograph that dialogues with the bodies lying on the ground.

From basement to attic/ do porão ao sótão, 2016-17

In observing the passing of the flowers I cultivate, the idea of ephemeral beauty, memory and death has led me to think about our desire for the perpetuation, or preservation, of what can no longer be: a life that flows and does not return , A love that vanishes, dreams that have lost their validity or have not been fulfilled.

The death of a flower perceived as a possibility, albeit ironic, of being reanimated anchored under humble fasteners of its inert matter. The broken fragile world / egg does not retreat to the smooth, hermetic surface, just as the life that nestled there can never return to the egg / uterus. The suture is an obvious failed attempt to resume shrapnel.

The interest was to discuss this collectivity from a domesticity: the house, the objects, the people who live there, their singularities perceived in this structure. The banal events that permeate life and its finitude are sources of inexhaustible beauty and gravity if able to perceive them. The domestic microcosm carries the macro complexity from the relations, perceptions and positions that are inscribed there. The title of the work “From the basement to the attic” speaks of this domestic

habitat, of this house-body and seeks to highlight the pitfalls, conscious or not, that permeate our beliefs and desires to go back in time to verify our misunderstandings, finitudes and chances of life wasted …

Panoramics of desire/ Panorâmicas do desejo, 2016

Four photographs make up the series: “A Winter Night’s Watch,” “A Spring Night’s Delight,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and “A Fall Night’s Dream.”

more about Ana…

Ana Sabiá, (born in San Paulo, Brazil, 1978). Currently lives and works in Florianopolis, Brazil.
Visual artist, photographer and researcher. PhD student in Visual Arts at the State University of Santa Catarina (UDESC), in the Teaching of Visual Arts line. Master in Social Psychology from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC). Graduated in Arts Education with qualification in Plastic Arts, Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP). Has professional experience in elementary and secondary education in the area of Visual Arts and Photography. As a photographer she participated in exhibitions and photography festivals in São Paulo, Florianópolis, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais. Currently, she develops research encompassing feminism in education and contemporary art. Visual portfolio available at: http://www.anasabia.com