Four naked Eastern European women with cameras may sound like a plot for pay per view porn, but is in fact the concept behind a new art collaboration. For the past year, the young artists Aneta Bartos, Martynka Wawrzyniak, Elle Muliarchyk and Yana Toyber have taken provocative, lusty, surreal, violent and tender photographs and videos of each other in the nude. “The work is so powerful, both culturally and aesthetically,” says the curator Anne Huntington, who is collaborating with the group on an early November exhibition. “It’s beautiful, raw and human, it’s almost like a purge.” To the artists, the project is a deeply personal exploration of sexual identity and relationships. The intimacy between them is palpable in the pictures, as the women expose themselves and each other with the kind of abandon that rarely exists outside a closed bedroom door.
Aneta Bartos
“For me, this project was originally about sex and spirit and how it plays such a role in shaping cultures and religions and taboos,,” says Aneta Bartos, an art and fashion photographer who was born in Poland. (All the artists are of Eastern-European origin) Her darkly romantic images are shot on Polaroid film in seedy hotel rooms, and have the look of sinister erotic tableaux. Bartos says that the work has helped her shed some of her Catholic baggage and embrace the power of female sexuality. She says: “As I started feeling these amazing connections with the other women, I introduced new issues about freedom and dominance. Because that’s how I really see the girls.”
Martynka Wawrzyniak
“I find the petty, competitive female nature very challenging . This is the first time that I have had close working relationships with a group of women,” says Martynka Wawrzyniak, a Polish-born photography and video artist who explores femininity with both brutality and warmth in the project. One her works is a split-screen video of the four artists emphatically smearing their faces with lipstick.” I wanted to challenge the whole idea of the beauty shot,” she says. “It’s interesting to see someone destroy their face with something that is supposed to beautify you. But it’s also about being bare. We just let go of all insecurities and I think we look so beautiful, because it’s the true person coming out.”
Yana Toyber
“I haven’t done any nudes until this project,” says the Ukrainian-born artist and fashion photographer Yana Toyber. “I have photographed a lot of people in the sex industry, but I always had the girls dressed because they’re always exposed and I wanted to show their faces.” She shoots her fellow collaborators under water and the images have a dreamy and tender quality. “I wanted to work with water because it feels a little embryonic and evokes the feeling of birth,” she says. The images also symbolize a more global form of nurturing. Says Tober: “Water is a resource that we need to protect. Its future scarcity threatens our survival.”
Elle Muliarchyk
Belarusian Elle Muliarchyk is a former model who made her name as an artist when she started taking guerrilla fashion pictures of herself in upscale boutique dressing rooms. “I’m fascinated with a woman’s body, but I see it not in relation to my own womanhood but more as a material – totally raw and foreign and pregnant with fantastical possibilities,” she says. It seems fitting then that she used her partners’ naked limbs to recreate her own “very sexual, visual and weird” dreams. One of her photos features a (taxidermy) wolf hovering over Aneta Bartos’ crotch and another shows Yana Toyber with a fire-spitting vagina. “A friend of mine called that picture very religious,” says Muliarchyk. “It’s a burning bush!”