Giulia Essyad
Blue Period: Living Statue recap   [ commission ]
Format Instagram Video | Document media Video, colour, sound, 5:59 min  | Issue date 2022  | To be seen in dis/appearing subjects, re.act.feminism #3 – polyphonies. interferences. drifts., 2022-2023  |   | Curated by EVBG (Marie Sophie Beckmann & Julie Gaspard)
Giulia Essyad (*1992, CH) is an artist, poet, performer. Interested in and inspired by the power of representation, she experiments with sculpture (ceramics, 3D printing, natural and industrial materials), photography, video and writing, as well as with her own body during performances, live or recorded. Her artistic work has taken her into research and practices that cite the body-positive movement. As a digital native born in a female body, Essyad's practice concerns the representation of bodies, online and IRL [in real life], and engages with the varied forms of alienation that come with the consumption and production of body images.

Blue Period: Living Statue recap revisits a performance Essyad developed during her time at art school in Geneva. Dressed in a makeshift costume as a blue harlequin from Picasso's paintings, she performed as a street mime to an audience of passers-by - in exchange for money - giving her an education that art school could not provide. The colour blue is a recurring theme in Essyad's work, both as a sign of otherness and as a reference to an artist's "blue period" or "darkest hour". In her work as a street artist, however, Essyad is less concerned with romanticising the struggling artist than with questioning the value of artistic practice as labour and where the lines are drawn between "high" and "low" art forms, and by whom. A slideshow was created from the snapshots, accompanied by Essyad's voice. Thinking back to the street performance, she reflects – poetically and not without a certain humour – on the merit of her own work: "What makes me needed?"
(Marie Sophie Beckmann)

Selected work from the re.act.feminism archive
Jakob Lena Knebl: Fettecke

"I like these works, there’s something very simple and very real about them that spoke to me. It made me think, the everyday body is the seat of love and genius. It made me reflect on the boldness and wisdom one can acquire, being fat, and how hard that is to communicate to people who don’t have this same experience."
Giulia Essyad