Lorena Cocioni (b.1995) lives and works in Bucharest. In her practice, she often uses the body senses and the ritual component of everyday actions, such as washing, combing hair, (un)dressing and taking care of the body. From the use of feathers, toiletry soaps to glass and metal shapes, she brings together different materials alongside her ceramics. She plays with them creating apparently fragile, yet very consistent works that resemble an almost ancient past, as well as a blurred future. Her works take a historical backward slide into the wondrous ‘make-up’ of the female body, putting on femininity with a vengeance, and suggesting the present inherent skill to peel it off. It is a space a woman owns in all its power, beyond the men-dominated world. Reflecting upon such ‘technologies’ of the self, Cocioni hints at the long societal exclusion of women and past gender discrepancies that, even in the great era of technological advancement, have still assigned household equipment to one and the equipment towards outer space to the other. Her most recent research is focused on ideas that frame femininity as a duality of inside and outside spaces, exploring one main subject: women as producers of spectacle or as spectacle themselves across history. Pointing to women’s corporeality within domestic confinement, to the hidden and intimate rituals seen as acts of claiming power, and to bodily insides as physical grounds, her works engage the visitor in a skin-permeating glare.
