Images of women and objectification of the female body are still central in our culture, dehumanizing women and portraying them as sexual objects. Therefore, corporeal representation is one of the fundamental issues of gender studies. This essay discusses female gaze on bodily subject and nudity within the feminist context in Russia.


The idea of ‘male gaze’ was introduced in 1975 by Laura Malvey, British feminist and film theorist, who criticized corporeal representation as being skewed for the viewing pleasure of men. In her essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' she reversed this pattern: “We can begin to make a break by examining patriarchy with the tools it provides.” Abstract videos of own nude buttocks by Yoko Ono, exposed body of Marina Abramovich, audacious performances of Valie Export and other prominent feminist works pushed the limits of the physical body in order to create an uncertain tension for both audience and artist.
However, this feminist wave did not reach the USSR.

While in the Western world feminist art rapidly developed in 1960-1970-ies in line with the Women’s Rights Movement, in Russia there was a time lag of nearly 30 years. Curiously, Russian women believed their rights were not infringed. Having a job had never been a privilege for Soviet women but rather an obligation, which deferred dissemination of feminist ideas in Russia. The government had always proclaimed equal rights for men and women, therefore Western feminist theory needed some tailoring to take into consideration peculiarities of the USSR and provide deeper explanation to attract followers. This lack of theoretical background was also restrained by exile of the most prominent feminist philosophers and writers before the Olympiad in 1980. As a result, even female artists who raised feminist questions did not associate themselves with feminism.

“…I have no intention to say that a woman’s role is in the kitchen, but <female> works <of that time> are mostly portraits of friends; there is something soft, comforting, escapist, an escape from the Soviet reality. The conceptualism cirсle, on the contrary, was a rather tough environment, the art was also tough.”

Nikita Alekseev*

There was a rather harsh but explicit comment from Konstantin Zvezdochetov*, who explained masculine approach of conceptualists and highlighted the features of the Russian context: “The fight for women’s rights at that time was associated with stout women in orange vests, Valentina Tereshkova and wives who had two jobs to support their alcoholic husbands. Our dames and mademoiselles were fed up with the Soviet feminism and deep inside desired to be sugar babes.” Evidently, this is why his wife, artist Larisa Rezun-Zvezdochetova, was famous for her hospitality and housekeeping talents, maintaining food to all artists living in their house, and working on her paintings at nights at the expense of sleep.

Obviously, this installation would have not been possible in the Soviet times, when Irina Nakhova was focused on gender-neutral art. All works decoding her personal relationship to being a woman were created only after the collapse of the USSR.

Despite early sprouts of feminism, it could not spread in Russia before perestroika. In 1990-ies the movement experienced burst of activity; numerous art communities, feminist circles, political groups, female writers’ or scientists’ unions emerged independently and almost simultaneously, which obviously spurred development of feminist art. The opening of the borders resulted in vast flow of information from the West and even some funding from the foreign foundations. What is more, the process was supported by the largest state-funded museums, which seems incredible now. In 2002 the Tretyakov Gallery held an exhibition Femme Art that showcased a large number of feminist and female-made works and was opened by a greeting letter from Hillary Clinton, who confessed her adoration of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova.

This short 20-year period of proliferating feminist art is best illustrated by ŽEN d’Art exhibition at Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art in 2010, focused on the emergence of gender-oriented art in the post-Soviet era. The show was curated by Oksana Sarkisyan (feminist artist and curator) and Natalia Kamenetskaya (who was at the forefront of gender studies in Russia and in 1989 co-founded research feminist group Idioma). The idea was to present most fully and vividly all the diversity of female artists: Žen d’Art exhibited both ‘feminist art’ and ‘art made by women’, as many participating female artists did not claim themselves as gender-conscious but did cover similar topics. For example, Irina Nakhova has never called herself a feminist, however her works of that period clearly represented feminist ideas. This exhibition presented her work with irons and ironing boards depicting nude male back, which apparently flipped over the male gaze.

The show illustrated that numerous authors called for ‘corporeal turn’ through their interest to female embodiment. In her Girl’s toy, Anna Alchuk explored the male gaze by reversing the situation and granting viewing pleasure to women. Her installation represented a female head (so that there is no objectification of the body) looking at photographs of ‘antique’ male torsos, beheaded and evidently objectified. The similar shift of the gazing stereotype was made by Tatiana Antoshina. Her Woman’s museum photographic series ironically remade classical paintings: Olympus (a young man in the setting of Manet’s Olympia), Boy on the Ball (half-naked boy instead of Picasso’s girl), Are You Jealous? (two nude men on a beach, after Gaughuin), etc. This inversion of gender roles reduced men to passive objects of desire, addressing the issues of body acceptance and reflecting on perception of women in art – patient, accessible, introvert and often naked.

ŽEN d’Art became the largest archive of feminist exhibitions of 1990-2009, representing such groups as 4th Hight, Cyberfemin Club, Factory of found clothes and VMS as well as artists of all generations starting from the Moscow conceptualism.

It should be noted however that feminist activity predominantly gravitated towards Moscow and Leningrad/St. Petersburg. In St. Petersburg, the most influential group was Cyberfemin Club. Cyberfeminism, or feminism activist in the Internet, fights representation of women as technophobic as well as encourages women to take more power in the IT segment and take part in defining policy of the net, creating content and guidelines, as nowadays information is predominantly delivered via Internet. In Russia, this movement was represented by Cyberfemin Club that emerged in 1994 when Irina Aktuganova and Alla Mitrofanova invited a German ship Stubnitz to St. Petersburg. This vessel carried an exhibition of new media, which raised enormous interest among local artists. Notably, most of these artists were women, so they set up a club supporting new media art and feminism through extremely diverse spectrum of activities: exhibitions, philosophy café, conferences, Media Art Fest, etc.

What is more, the dresses are empty, the bodies are missing. The theme of missing body was also present in clothes that Factory of Found Clothes created for sale, which could be decorated with a sudden beaded blood stain or a rough beaded seam resembling a scar.

Later on, being interwoven with their personal experience, FFC’s art encompassed various social problems related to gender. For instance, the group shot an opera Three Mothers and a Chorus about motherhood, which was based on narratives of real exhausted mothers backed by the Greek chorus represented by the families judging the mothers.

In Moscow, art environment was featured by less activism and higher concentration on personal projects. A rather striking show speaking about female body was Collection-2000, solo exhibition of Natalia Turnova in Regina Gallery in 2000, presenting paintings and colorful sculptures. The works were supplemented by text that was very typical for medical staff working with pregnant and women in labor. The artist reflected on medical violence, traumatic experience of physiological humiliation and sense of own insignificance. Turnova viewed the Russian maternity health care system as the underside of love, or penitentiary structure punishing women for having sex.

Highly radical performances within the Moscow actionism movement were attributable to Baryana Rossa, a Bulgarian artist who was a partner of another Moscow actionist Oleg Mavromati. She stitched up her vagina, sewed herself to a large wheel and repeated performance by Valie Export. The latter, being topless, put on a cardboard box with two holes in the front, and offered anyone to touch her naked breasts. As Rossa experienced mastectomy, she offered to touch her scars in the same manner. In this way, the idea of fragility was pushed to the limits, but at the same time this work addressed the problem of body acceptance, especially after a surgery.

Elena Kovylina, the most famous female performance artist in Russia, accentuated vulnerability of a female body, mapping her work around the themes of violence, victim and fragility. The artist also published feminist newspaper called Stone Milk. In 2006 she won Innovation prize for performance Pick up a girl. Stripped to the waist, she attached photos of girls to her skin with pins. In other performances, also half-naked, she pierced her skin with jewelry, or totally naked lay on the grand piano at the central square of Salzburg as a muse, expressing her embarrassment by the role of women merely as muses in art. Physiological audacity revealed the essence of Kovylina’s art – her works were first and foremost about shame.

All of the above signified the golden age of feminist art in Russia, peaking at early 2000-s. However, the political situation was changing and implying more limitations, so the censorship issues emerged. ‘The personal is political’, the motto of the second wave feminism, came to Russia only in 1990-ies but could not stay long. After the outrageous trial of Pussy Riot in 2012 and growing demonstration of force by the state the political narrative gradually became quieter but has never faded. Surprisingly, the number of ‘feminist’ and ‘gender’ exhibitions in 2013-2015 soared, hyped by mass media and sometimes even state-funded. However, their content was far less relevant to feminism and generally misleading.

As a result, she deconstructs her subjects as construction drawings, and decomposes complex phenomena into simple parts. Interestingly, it is quite common for female artists to use drawing as a preferred medium, which was also visible in Feminist Pencil movement (2012-2014) that focused on graphic stories, zines, graffiti and drawing as affordable and understandable ways of communication.

Serge’s series of drawings titled Body is remarkable for corporeal representation: no flesh, importance of voids but at the same time a weird sense of restraint. The agitated line and distorted forms remind of Egon Schiele, whose line was a metaphor of boundaries. Serge further elaborates this idea and claims that the borderline dictates our conscious perception of the subject.