The Bride by Joanna Vasconcelos

Playing with the prestigious decorum that once adorned salons in an unexpected way, Joana Vasconcelos carries out remarkable work whose novel aspects are almost imperceptible. A satirical copy of perverted luxury and grandeur, The Bride, known as A Noiva in its original language, is impressive with its immense yet minute finesse. Evoking this piece as her “most important and emblematic creation,” the artist is bringing back a sophisticated brand of ready-made that’s all to do with femininity. This is how she started off creating The Bride in 2001, finishing it four years and 25,000 tampons later.

This heightened femininity is only revealed to better denounce the common areas we associate it with. Playing “with appropriation, decontextualization, and the subversion of pre-existing objects and daily realities,” Joana Vasconcelos aims to break taboos in a hypersexualized but paradoxically conservative society. This emblematic piece may go unnoticed on first look, but its composition has been the object of many a rejection. It was even refused on her own national soil, with a number of warehousemen initially interrupting The Bride’s installation after discovering that it was made out of tampons in 2005. In that same year, the piece was a resounding success at the Biennale, referred to as a revelation for the artist.

Uniting the luxurious and the ordinary, in 2012 Joana Vasconcelos was the first female artist to be invited to Versailles. Even though she had already precisely imagined her baroque pieces set up in the bastion of French luxury and royalty, the artist still ran up against many a hurdle. While she thought The Bride would go marvelously in the famed Galerie des Glaces, this opinion was not shared by Catherine Pégard, the château’s director. With the pretext of a lack of “resonance” with the Sun King’s abode, the chandelier was given the thumbs down, which didn’t sit well with the artist: “(these) pieces (are deemed) ‘sexual’, and they’re not appropriate for Versailles. As if there haven’t already been so many women in Versailles and so many sex stories!” In her immaculate white dress, The Bride speaks with watermark blood, which becomes immediately intolerable. Even though the exhibit is maintained in the piece itself, Joana Vasconcelos was able to install the chandelier into the glass ceiling of the Centquatre. It looks like this time around it’s a victory for this artist who claims she “wants to bring a critical regard to the hypocrisy of society.”