Date of the work: 2018
Medium: Intimate performance for single channel video (& limited edition prints)
Exhibition history: Trasparenza (2022); Prestorjha (2023)
Working with Ġismi [item 24] just before the Spazju Kreattiv exhibition in 2020, the artist saw that the piece was suitable for performance work. This is entitled Not Venus and presented as a work of video art, which captures the intimate performance Tabone gave to her camera, without anyone else in her studio. The video consists of a series of still images captured as the artist wore Ġismi on her own naked body as a way to embody her belief that only women who have experienced certain things through their own bodies can pass on detailed information about women’s bodies through art.
The video art is rather impressionistic, with elements of illuminism, even if it is built on a relatively concrete concept. The version of the video presented during the 2020 Art+Feminism exhibition at Spazju Kreattiv, was also shown during the Trasparenza exhibition at the University of Malta’s Valletta Campus in 2022. For the 2023 exhibition, Tabone created a second, slightly revised, version of the video, which is very similar to the original version but contains images taken from a second performance she captured just a few weeks before 119 the 2023 exhibition. As is often the case with performance art, the remains of the live work documented through photography or video creates a very different experience for the audience than it would have had it been present in the physical space where the performance was originally enacted and at the same time it was physically presented by the artist.
Tabone has chosen to distance the live performance even further by creating a set of limited-edition prints from Not Venus, which are printed on 30cm x 42cm plexiglass, with a hook on the back so they can also be hung on a wall or other vertical flat surface.
