Furniture Bondage - The Thing About...Melanie Bonajo

Melanie Banajo is a Dutch artist, currently taking part in a yearlong residency at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanian in Berlin. Her work spans photography, performance, video, and installation and her conceptual focus is equally as expansive. Bonajo’s work addresses concepts of mysticism, naturalism, and objecthood and the conflict that arises amongst these issues. When looking over her portfolio and publications, it becomes clear that her oeuvre contains a wide breadth of themes and ideas. In one moment her work plays with activism and social awareness and in another it may seem as though it retreats into fantasy. In her popular “Bondage” series, the viewer finds the female form entrapped and constricted by objects- chairs, cords, brooms, etc. At a glance, Bondage appears to be loaded with radical symbolism that encapsulates notions of feminism and acts as critique of object-fetishism. Yet as these videos progress, one half of a dialogue emerges through phone conversations. The conversations are performed transcriptions of dreams, scavenged from friends and family of the artist. The conversations, as you might expect, are bizarre and aloof- a collage of recollections and confusing descriptions. The addition of these conversations seem to push the works further from a straightforward criticism of commodity and capitalist-entrapments and into a place that is a little less quantifiable. Music: "Floating Cities" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/