Confronting the gaze

In Confronting the gaze, Alice Marcelino, Astrid González and Rebecca Fontaine Wolf present an artistic practice that combines photography, intervened photography and video in order to take hold of a form of representation that makes use of the body itself to generate images that confront the spectator through the aesthetic, through the unpleasant and through the rawness of the facts we dismiss in order to reveal these perverse dynamics of the gaze and destabilise the hegemonic discourses of race and gender.

In the photographic series ‘Black Skin, White Algorithms’ (2023) Alice Marcelino references Frantz Fanon’s seminal work, ‘White Skins, Black Masks’, one of the most influential and at the same time devastating theories in the analysis of the post-colonial question, which dissects in psychopathological terms how white supremacism affects the unconscious of the black population, affecting the image they construct of themselves as inevitably subjugated to the white canon, referencing it, imitating it, situating themselves in a position of insufficiency before it. In this photographic series by Alice, the faces of the subjects are masked in a binary code representation to talk about how new cybernetic technologies have a racial bias, as facial recognition algorithms recognise white or light skin and tend to exclude black skin.

In the photographic series ‘Black Skin, White Algorithms’ (2023) Alice Marcelino references Frantz Fanon’s seminal work, ‘White Skins, Black Masks’, one of the most influential and at the same time devastating theories in the analysis of the post-colonial question, which dissects in psychopathological terms how white supremacism affects the unconscious of the black population, affecting the image they construct of themselves as inevitably subjugated to the white canon, referencing it, imitating it, situating themselves in a position of insufficiency before it. In this photographic series by Alice, the faces of the subjects are masked in a binary code representation to talk about how new cybernetic technologies have a racial bias, as facial recognition algorithms recognise white or light skin and tend to exclude black skin.

Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf produces a body of work in which she uses the self -portrait extensively as a medium to talk about her experience as a woman in the age of digital immediacy and the saturation of images that inundate our everyday experience. Rebecca portrays the visceralities of women’s experience that are usually hidden because they confront the idealised reality of the canonical view of women, which is adjusted to male desire. In the series ‘Natureza Morta’ and ‘Corpo Real’ (2022-2023), the artist constructs images in which the gaze is fragmented into multiple realities and generates a sensation of ambiguity between the disturbing and the pleasurable.

Curated by Carmen Bioque, 2024