Steel spheres, vulvas in pink resin and a wooden penis. Three forms and three materials face each other, associating or confronting according to our questioning vision and our sexual practices, between pleasure and torture, in the garden of penises where one passes imperceptibly from delight to suffering.
The spheres, smooth bodied, brilliant and generous which incorporate indifferently, playfully, the masculine or feminine sex, becoming minor inquisitors reflecting a vulva, exposed, in spite of herself, to the sight of everyone. Then, the spheres open revealing a world closed and confined, oppressive, filled with penal rods all directed against the vulva which seems each time, a prisoner of its inner surface, petrified in the resin, delivered to the mercy of those too numerous rough, wooden pieces. The opening of the spheres acts as a revelation; it is a matter of exposing the sexual attacks and at the same time suspending them, the space of a moment; for the collective rape will not take place if the sphere is closed or the eyes are closed. It suffices that the penis quit its overriding position and rest beside the feminine spheres so that the game can repeat, liberating all pleasure, in a reciprocal relationship where each object reflects the other symmetrically. Pacifier or rattle, the male sex becomes the object of all fantasies.
How does a woman experience a free sexual life without bowing to the disapproval of a society still under patriarchal rules and how does she accept her desires while refusing to The Garden of Penises submit to those of others? How to avoid the male domination that inhibits our intimacy and limits the reciprocity at the center of our relations? How to speak of rape, the suffering, the humiliation. What to do with the notion of consent which tends to lift the weight of sexist mechanisms and the limits of submission?
It is in a resolutely feminist approach, that Ximena Alarcon invites the spectator to take a position and to analyze their own point of view, tempted at time to voyeurism, inclined at times to blindness, duped by false comparisons, based by stereotypes that are always best to reconsider.
CAROLINE MINARD PARIS, JULY 2018
Certainly, here is the translation in English:
Previously exhibited at:
Casa Mérida Contemporary, CDMX. 2020 PRPG Gallery, CDMX. 2021 Museum of Contemporary Art of Querétaro. MACQ. Mexico. 2023
