chloe abidi

Artist Statement

Working interdisciplinarily across video-performance, image-making, and new media, my practice examines the symbolic world of prey animals, the fem body, surveillance, bedrooms, fairy tales, and hiding places. Through these motifs, standardized conceptions of fantasy, vulnerability, and power imbalance are subverted. By inverting the logic of “winning,” the work invites alternative reflections on agency, protagonism, and the hero’s journey.
"phantasmagorias" is an ongoing interdisciplinary project that posits the artist as an exaggerated caricature of an agoraphobic and perverted woman immersed in cyberspace, internet subculture, and her own imaginary world. The project engages with my experiences with as well as the visual excesses and emotional extremities of online spaces like pro-eating disorder blogs, pornography, “thirst-traps,” GIFs, and early Tumblr aesthetics. Many of the referential touchpoints, for the caricature-girl, surround an ultimately disappointing promise of a better reality. Fairy tales, and motifs like princesses, damsels in distress, magic, castles, and a special world, are positioned beside some of the transfigurations present in potentially menacing Internet media which similarly promise a newfound, pseudo-divine reality.
While the work acknowledges the threat embedded in these power imbalances, it also offsets them through transfiguration, mirroring the beautification and ornamentation found in pro-eating disorder imagery and violent pornographic media. I am fascinated by the potential extremes that arise when women disseminate images of their own bodies online, often in search of affirmation or visibility. In these acts, self-presentation becomes a kind of algorithmic supplication, a blasphemous prayer to the computer, driven by sexuality, desire, and profound isolation.