4 Women
Tali Tamir
Michal Shamir uses conventions that originated from the fashion world of magazines and models, as a starting point (some of them come from a joined project she did with the fashion chain “comme il fault”).
Shamir downsizes the fashion photographs into a contour line drawn with pencil, that emphasize their schematic stature- representation!
Continuing the subversive tactics that Shamir developed as a work method in the last couple of years, here again she inserts a foreign compound into the naive system: The stain. The bloodstain, flowing between the model’s legs as a strong revolt against the complex observance methods the western culture developed, in attempt to conceal and erase the feminine cycle. The elegant model, dressed in a light blue suit- bright, smug and relaxed, is the last person expected not to follow the strict rules of tidiness and observance (did she forget to take the needed precautions?).
The flowing blood doesn’t only break the hygienic placidity of the fashion routine, but questions the model’s own sanity and imposes on her instantly the bizarre area of human- feminine existence: the one that does not respect norms. No rule is more strict then the one ordering women to hide their cycle, their passion, their body.
Shamir offers the slow drip down the leg as a serene acceptance. After all, the woman’s period is a sign of time, a point in the cycle of female life, bleeding and renewing every single month.
But the stain also becomes unruly: it sticks to furniture, leaves traces, refuse to disappear, and onwards it climbs to the angle of the mouth, the side of the eye, the shoulder, spreads here and there creating a red aura to the womanly threatened existence, in a world that still- many and too dangerous times- witnesses violent outbreaks of male aggression.
October, 2001
