Markela Panegyres

A Living Doll

AIRspace Projects

Sydney

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Dolls and clowns share the same characteristics of being able to elicit contradictory responses of both charm and unease. Not for nothing is ‘uncanny’ frequently appended before the word doll. There is also a particular phobia germane to clowns, known as ‘coulrophobia’. Dolls and clowns that feature in films are invariably malign: ciphers and receptacles of destructive forces that lurk precariously behind their superficial appeal. As far as we know, dolls have been with us since the beginning of civilisation, as both a girl’s toy but also a means of her socialisation towards womanhood and motherhood. In our times, there is added relevance for the doll which has now something of a marginal yet nonetheless established status as a companion for sex and, as we stretch ourselves to believe, for relationships. Since the early millennium, certain men, including those in China who find themselves in the vast majority as a legacy of the one-child policy, are turning to partnerships with dolls. There is now also a word for people with sexual preferences for artificial bodies, a ‘robosexual’. The criticism of the way that some men objectify women, requiring generic traits which treat them as playthings, has become a reality. Markela Panegyres’s exhibition A Living Doll, dealt with such themes with harrowing perversity.

The exhibition consisted principally of performance video. At the end of the room lay the principal projection, Pretty in Pink, of a girl (the artist) in a white chiffon dress, a pink bow around her waist, and fake lilac flowers in her hair. She is sitting on a wooden floor against a plain background rocking convulsively, bursting into a tantrum. The footage is saturated with pink

Markela Panegyres, Pretty in Pink, 2019. Video performance, digital video, 5’43". Video performance, digital video. Courtesy the artist.

Markela Panegyres, Quite Contrary, 2019. Video performance, digital video, 2’14”. Video performance, digital video. Courtesy the artist.