Katerina Lymar: Call me a slut
Katerina Lymar: CALL ME A SLUT
CREDITS
She opens the viewers’ eyes to things that we don’t want to or are too much in a hurry to notice. Meet Katerina Lymar, a Ukrainian photographer who with the maturity of a professional doesn’t shy away from representing topics of injustice that for some may be too difficult to process. With her camera, Lymar adopts the female gaze to tackle issues of sexuality, body rights, and nudity. Whereas two of her other projects follow the lives of the elderly people in Ukrainian society or the mental and behavioral condition of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, in today’s portfolio we feature her third project – Call me a Slut. In this series, Lymar subversively challenges the photography medium to emancipate the female body from external pressures.
The series captures predominantly a female body in different poses or from various angles. Lymar’s portraits come close to the depicted subject, but at the same time, they keep a sense of distance in the aftermath creating a sense of mystery. For instance, in the work Mind your own business (2019), the model openly looks into the eyes of a viewer. Other works in the series show a fragmented glimpse into the character’s life. The graininess of the photographs changes the texture of the bodies in photographs making them look as if they came from a dream. Phantom (2021) takes this aesthetic even further to blur the entire human figure, whereas the violet background creates a futuristic impression.
From May 6-8th, Lymar exhibited a combination of her three photography projects at Hazenstraat 18. The photographs on the show seemed to have one thing in common – a sense of tranquility – having a stopping power on the viewers, leaving them in a state of contemplation. The images’ calmness however doesn’t deny the dynamics which each of the different moments holds within. In an interview, Katerina disclosed that before coming to Amsterdam she used to dance. All the works both in the series and in the exhibition connote a documentation of a choreography. One is certain, Lymar skillfully expresses the beauty of motion and emotion of contemporary life.
