The idea of listening to a fortune teller sometimes is to listen to someone telling you what you already know about your self or your life, giving you guidance on how to act in certain situations. The paper fortune tellers came to my childhood as a game that we called “Namakdan” ( literally translate to salt cellar), in a form of a question and a need of guidance : what will I do in the future?, what job will I have?, should I do this?, should I go there?…
When it comes to social behavior there is always a time that we ask our selves why we behave the way we do and where do our beliefs come from. Growing older sometimes made me not only question my behavior but their existence and how I learned about them, making me analyze my choices and my behaviors and deciding new ways and meanings for them. Going further in life sometimes you find yourself in need of guidance in order to figure out if you should give in to these norms and do’s and don’ts or should you act against them. But how can you find these guidance?
The answer is sometimes there is non, sometimes these matters are hold in abeyance with you going back and forth trying to figure out the “correct” way. Starting to shift the boundaries of my private life from a girl who learned that her body is “precious” in a way that it will lose its value if shown, made these going back and forwards feel like the “fortune teller“ game : in need of guidance when you don’t know what is the reaction to your action, asking without ever knowing the right answer.
Deciding how to own my body and decisions regarding in its values has taken lots of thinking and analyzing and has being the main subject of “My Precious Things project”. In my Precious things project the audience is confronted with a decision that has been finally made : I am the owner of this body, only I can understand it values and I decide it will not lose it values if it is shared and shown publicly.
But behind working on such subject and pushing away taboos is years and years of thinking and learning : going back and forth, asking questions and not knowing.
The fortune teller has an engagement with the double standards related to female gender and sexuality, which was expressed in much of my works.
This projects tries to turn a game into a mirror of how me learn about these double standards at an early age and how we are always involved and engaged into deciding how to react about them.
The “fortune teller” book invites the audience to create and play artist’s childhood game. Playing this game makes the audience put themselves in the shoes of the artist going literally back and forward and playing with what she learned in her childhood and how she has found her guidance herself after years of entanglement with the subject.
This project is an extension of “My precious things” project started early 2015.
