by Trenza Collective
Dozen of pages are written about all the actors and subjects involved: about Not Dressed to Conquer/ Haute Couture 4. Transport, about the Spanish curators Paul Preciado and Valentin Roma, and the German co-curators Hans D. Christ and Iris Dressler, about the artists, the director, the King, the Queen as a sponsor of the museum, the Macba and their contract with the Wurttemberg Kunstverein. And of all these people not a single person questions if a helmeted, naked Domitila trapped between a dog and the king of Spain is really a critique of colonialism. The only statement by Doujak that is cited is the one she gives last December in the São Paulo Biennial, about how the work “plays with power relations and subverts them.” In the center of all gazes, in the very middle of an artwork that supposedly criticizes colonialism, Domitila and what she represents remains invisible to all. Here in the most mediatic moment a political artist concerned with oppression could wish for, Ines Doujak says nothing. Neither do the curators. Nobody speaks up or seems to be bothered by the objectualization of Domitila. The whole perspective that would make her struggle as a political subject to be understood is missing.