Marikel Lahana
Nina - Installation - 2010
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 12
Installation
This piece is installed in the recess of a room, in the corner opposite where the visitor comes in. It is a series of photographic images: a portrait in the form of a constellation of a one and unique young woman, Nina. The images are presented in the form of black and white prints under opal Diasec, with fine electro-luminous back lighting, encapsulated in a discreet frame. Nina Roberts is an ex-porn star, anorexic, bulimic and coming out of a long period of drug addiction. I caught her in this change of life that influences and takes over her changing body. A body CASE – a body SCREEN The physical proposal resembles on the surface a post-documentary vision. Even if the image documents, it does not give itself up easily in an excess of the visual. My photographs try to render what goes beyond this body. The work plays on the border of the image: between presentation, fiction, composite image and snapshot. Nina is a constructed body, an image that has become little by little a fiction of herself. A body which, in its overexposure, has became a stranger and that she tries to tame: notably by abandoning the hair extensions, a characteristic female feature which marked her entrance into the pornographic world, a capillary cage now past, and which ends a period of her life. The photography is grainy, trembling and hesitant; it insists on the truth of a body by avoiding the glamour and sexy overtones with which it is nevertheless imbued.
