Scenes in the Sublevel
Ebecho Muslimova has a show up at the Drawing Center until May 23 that you should see if you’re in New York. Here is something I wrote to accompany her visual essay in Cura #30.
In a common nightmare, you walk the halls of your office or college campus, naked and unkempt. You recognize the reality of your hunching body and exposed privates, but only after they have been the focus of peer attention for an ambiguous amount of time. You’ve forgotten a step between one existence—the sleep state, in which the body is not under one’s control—and another—the professional performance, in which a person’s appearance illustrates responsibility. Posture, makeup, hairstyle, and clothing give the impression of dedication to the cause of studied assimilation, and in this dream, you unwittingly rebel. The concern is not necessarily that it happened but that you did it unintentionally—you let this happen, which means you have lost the essential part of your mind that splits these two selves.
The artist Ebecho Muslimova invented Fatebe (pronounced “fat eebee”) when she had a day job at a corporate office. Fatebe was all ego, a version of the artist’s self sans inhibitions. In an immediate interpretation of the typical insecurity nightmare, she finds herself in public with no beautifying ephemera. But Fatebe feels no shame from this predicament. Instead, she finds pleasure experiencing her precariousness fully, splayed and physically vulnerable while expressing an almost arrogant joy from the amount of space she inhabits. An alter ego, Fatebe is allergic to elitism, and so the luxury of rejecting commercial work while one’s potential simmers is something the cartoon character would scoff at, if she ever paused for long enough to care.
Her own haplessness, an accidental disregard for societal norms, and a balloon-like body excite Fatebe. In pen and ink drawings and large-scale paintings of mixed detail, every misstep she takes proves she can take more, that the outcomes can’t hurt her pride if she has decided against any kind of preciousness. In lucid dreams, a fall can turn into flight. Similarly, accidental nudity can turn into a stregnth.
In much of the world, the amount of space a woman’s body takes up has an almost directly inverted relationship to the amount of respect she is rewarded. In Fatebe’s world, she appears to believe the opposite is true—and that exposure is everything. Sometimes, she is mural-sized, expanding across an entire building floor, her cartoon holes and nipples punctuating a clumsy pose. She dares you to call her unsexy, unserious, or unworthy of attention. Even if you did, she wouldn’t believe it. Fatebe straddles all sides of an Approval Matrix; she is inside a display case, peering only at its own reflection.
A conceptual artist might have nightmares in which she accidentally sends her gallery a file of doodles instead of the work she’s been perfecting for decades, ruining her career by exposing her somewhat less rigorous side. Fatebe embraces this fear, even if the work in which she features has become increasingly complex. The character is faced with newly articulated objects, stretched over landscapes that are populated with new temptations and ghosts. With adoring precision, Muslimova codifies the echoes of domesticity, luxury, nature, education, psychology, fetish, and art itself—images that have the capacity to haunt her. Nothing can deter Fatebe, though. From her gleeful smile we can assume that her convictions only gain momentum with every new opportunity to test them.