“INNOCENT AT FIRST GLANCE”
When the body is naked, the gaze takes on a political significance. Frankfurt-based artist Sonja Yakovleva uses her incisive paper cuttings to highlight social grey areas and blind spots.
Interview: Dr Gregor Jansen, member of the LBBW Collection’s Expert Advisory Board and former director of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf
Dr Gregor Jansen, LBBW Collection: You explore historical and political themes, everyday culture in a meritocracy, and the cult of the body; you use pornographic and online images in which personal and collective narratives about power relations and sexuality are explored. Historically speaking, paper cuttings reflect folk motifs that have been quite firmly inscribed in the collective consciousness. Why this technique?
Sonja Yakovleva: Paper cuttings fascinated me above all because of their artisanal character and their ambivalent position in European art history. The technique, also known as ‘silhouette’, takes its name from the French Finance Minister Étienne de Silhouette, who, in the 18th century, is said to have decorated his house with paper cuttings rather than paintings, out of a spirit of thrift. I am drawn to working with a medium that was long regarded as worthless and kitsch, and dismissed as mere folk art. I seek to challenge this perception and lend paper cutting new relevance. Furthermore, paper cutting is historically closely associated with the idyllic, often banal motifs of the Biedermeier period. The combination of this seemingly harmless, craft-based medium with explicit, pornographic content – a genre that is widely consumed by society yet simultaneously treated as taboo and devalued – subverts these expectations: instead of harmlessness, one encounters radical, disturbing or intimate scenes. The detailed craftsmanship stands in deliberate contrast to the rapid consumption of pornographic images. Viewers are initially drawn in by the formal aesthetics, but must then grapple with the underlying content.
Dr Gregor Jansen, LBBW Collection: Your visual language is rich in contrast, transparent and powerful. Fetish lingerie or underwear appear like butterfly and insect specimens, which is reminiscent of colonial expeditions, but also of the capitalist compulsion to categorise, evaluate and market every fetish. What is the story behind ‘The Laundresses’, which was created in Korea?
Sonja Yakovleva: This large-scale work was created in 2019 during my residency at the MMCA in Seoul. At the time, I asked myself how the body, read as female, could be depicted naked without once again being reduced to sexualisation or objectification. With the white of the paper, the flowering plants and the naked bodies, the image appears, at first glance, innocent and beautiful. We see a fantasy landscape with mountains, waterfalls and a river, in which the women go about their task of washing clothes. Yet the setting is not merely idyllic: unwelcome visitors who gain unauthorised access are violently driven away by the women. It is an exclusive society in which the women themselves determine who belongs and who does not. I was troubled by how traditional depictions of women washing clothes – mostly by male artists – romanticise and sexualise the work, often staged for the male gaze, with corsets or dresses that deliberately slip out of place, whilst men watch passively from some corner. My version depicts the women naked, but without sexualisation: they are self-determined and shape their own time, their interactions and their safe space, where they feel comfortable and protected.
Biography
Sonja Yakovleva , born in Potsdam in 1989, lives and works in Frankfurt am Main. She studied at the Offenbach University of Art and Design and the Athens School of Fine Arts. Her work has been exhibited at venues including the Frankfurter Kunstverein, the Kunstraum Potsdam, the Kunstpalais Erlangen and the Kunstmuseum Wiesbaden.