Title: Estonia: A Woman Takes Little Space

Artist: Liina Siib

Venue: San Marco

Sarah Hardie interview Liina Siib about her project, A Woman Takes Little Space

Sarah Hardie: Showing this work at the Biennale, in a place where you represent/are synonymous with Estonia, was it important to you to make work which had a political and socially responsible element to it? To make a difference? Do you think this sort of work can make a difference? And in a wider sense do you believe art can make a difference?

Liina Siib: I did not start this project having Venice biennale in my mind. I am interested in visual representations of social conditions and reflections of gendered spatial relationships in contemporary society. Submitting my project to the Estonian pavilion competition came later. Gaining this opportunity to present the project enabled more focused approach, a team work and production support. I could concentrate on certain topics and to interweave them with each other. To me it has been a way to communicate in society, to do my visual research on positions of femininity, to understand the limits and borders of female space. Art is just another language, a bridge between different parties. As a tool a of making visible underexposed areas it can make a difference. Some art does make a difference for me. It can give different points of views and through visual montage on social issues we can also learn something else than by purely theoretical approach.

SH: As an Estonian woman artist is it important to you that you speak about these issues of women’s work and place in society – is this where you feel the power of art lies

LS: I would not put that so directly – I happen to be a woman and an artist but if I do my works it does not cling in my head all the time. Sometimes these two together are an advantage, sometimes it is not. In a way I have felt enough sympathy to show women’s issues in my work. I use the images that somehow accord to the images that are floating in my head, consciously and unconsciously. Regarding these images I do not think that now I am making art. It is what I am interested in and to show it in the context of contemporary art is one possibility. It is articulating and addressing issues that I feel relevant to myself at the moment.

SH: Was it your intention to almost embarrass the person who wrote in the Estonian media that ‘women require less space for their everyday work (and less pay) than men’, in quoting this person in your feminist work, or did you want to embarrass, not just them, but the world, to say look at this: people still believe this?

LS: I am not sure this person is even aware about my project. I have no feedback from him and it was not my aim to embarrass him personally, then I would of sent him a personal letter. It was to deal with this statement about the ‘female space’, give it a visualisation from my point of view. This year we got the statistics that the gender pay gap is biggest in Estonia within the EU, Estonian women earn in average 30% less than Estonian men. I think this matter should embarass people here.    

SH: Space is very important to you in the films; did you want the six-room apartment installation to function as an uncanny home environment for the viewer, placing them in an imagined uncomfortable domestic sphere? Is it through the uncanny and the realizations that occur in this state you hope to create understanding and questioning of the norm.

LS: Exactly, space is important. It is not only important in my films but in other media too. I like to show my work as an installation that supports and enhances the idea that I would like to convey with the photographic records either in films or photos. With A Woman Takes Little Space I wanted to examine can a woman be defined by space.

SH: What sort of space do you feel a woman does and should occupy?

LS: Perhaps a woman should aim for a space of her own, she gives up too much to the demands of others and agrees with the conditions that are defined in advance. On the other hand women can domesticate any space to be able to work there. But they hardly fill up a space as men can do even unnoticed.

SH: Your work deals with ritual and the sense of going nowhere – do you feel repetition can have the power to make anew, to change (in the Deleuzian sense) or is repetition/ritual cyclic motion something your work actually speaks against?

LS: I personally don’t like repetition very much, I like to take new ways, risks and not to work in editions. Perhaps this dislike of repetition somehow appears in my works as a form of repetition. Repetition/ritual cycle can contain both potential – making anew or retain existing order, stagnation. Visually, repetition can be engaging, hypnotising, making uncanny; on the other hand, it is exhausting.

SH: What sort of space do you give men in your videos? Can you explain this for us? Is it the sort of space you would give them if it were down to you to create a new world order, or do you feel they already occupy this space in the world?

LS: In my three videos and a sound piece at the Palazzo Malipiero men are present less or more with their voice (singing or speaking) and by their statements. Thus they do not occupy much space visually but rather as sound waves their voices spread around. This is certainly not the model of the world I would like to create. It is a way of showing things in the context of the project. There might be a possibility for a viewer to experience conventionality of natural order we are living and status quo of gendered space.

SH: Your work speaks of women as things that are consumed – how then did you go about representing woman in your videos (available to consume visually again in this context)? Do you actively allow the consumer/viewer to visually consume them as long at it is self-consciously done? Are there any techniques you use or adopt in order to de-fetishise “the object on screen” (woman)?

LS: In a consumer society everything can become a thing to be consumed. I do not think that my work speaks only about consuming women or making them things. I try to show them as dignified subjects with self-esteem and dreams, they are women standing on their own feet. I am aware how making a photographic or video work about someone can objectify the subject, it happens both with male and female subjects. Sometimes I try to de-fetishise the object on the screen by using the fetishising methods, close ups, diverse viewpoints. To make it strange and oversaturated through humour and laughing at oneself.  In one video one can only hear the voices of interviewed women. Sometimes when a woman herself tries to pose consciously as an object of visual pleasure for a male gaze, I try to diminish it, to make the gaze unreturned. This project was done as an agreement between me and my ‘actors’. They are playing themselves, consciously.