Kelly Sinnapah Mary
Using the senses, using the beautiful to better capture the truths that are too crual is what the artist Kelly Sinnapah Mary does. Don’t be mistaken, her work puts us in an intimist world where you can feel a sweet atmosphere that does not hide the silence of dramas at all.
For many years Kelly Sinnapah Mary has developed a work which essence originates from her childhood. The artist grew in one of these numerous West Indies families that are over-protecting and worried about the good education of girls. Her bedroom, where she spends most of her time, is her sanctuary where she tries to solve the world’s problem.
She uproots from it the bed, the bedclothes, the material, the thread, indeed all the comforting elements that shaped her world for nineteen years. Strongly touched by the work of Marina Abramovic, Yayoi Kusama or Tracey Emin, the world of Kelly Sinnapah Mary is full of echoes and symbolic frames that become the mainsprings of a universal reflection.
«I work on what touches me and only what touches me1.» In her work, she points out human condition in society, dominating/dominated relationships, hypersexualization or male/female relationships. But she is also worried about much harder topics such as castration. Her in situ drawings of levitating penis hanging on balloons or lipsticks on a window pane show it.
Almost one month after the end of her exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami it’s at the Maëlle Gallery that Kelly Sinnapah Mary shows Vagina, Jyoti Singh Pandey. An original and in situ work filled with objects, vibrations and rhythms of the area of Belleville at the same time of the biennal event.
Jyoti Singh Pandey is the name of that young Indian student victim of a collective rape in a bus. Her death caused strong popular reactions. «I can’t forget the vision of those so numerous windows through which the scene in the bus was showed, I can’t forget that space supposed to be safe that became like a bedroom turned into a place of extreme violence and domination(…) The horrorful time Jioty Singh Pandey had, arouses in me a whole reflection about the female condition in India and I eventually think that event should provoke a reflection about symbolic and physical violences built up socially and historically worldwide2.».
Without considering herself as a feminist artist, Kelly Sinnapah Mary continually denounces violence against women. According to her, reducing the concept Vagina to a feminist work « would mean hiding its universal dimension and refusing it any extra feminist impact3».
(1), (2) et (3) The artist : a wide awake political being. Interview with Dominique Brebion