After graduating in 1993 from the School of Fine Arts in Seville, Pilar Albarracín swiftly became a major artist, first in the Spanish contemporary art scene and then on the international stage, through her militant work where pride of place was given to her criticism of the inequalities between women and men in post-Franco Spanish society. She has produced installations, photographs and videos, as well as, and above all, performances, in which she incarnated different types of women (prostitute, dancer, singer, gypsy, housewife, and emigrant), in which she deconstructed clichés with sarcasm and irony, especially the image of the Andalusian woman, glorified during the Franco regime, whom she parodied using components of the national identity: religion, folklore, dance, bullfighting, flamenco, and gastronomy. Each of her presentations was organized around the notions of rite, sacrifice and symbol. The photograph Prohibido el cante (2000) thus showed her gagged and bound to a chair, wearing a flamenco dress – one of her fetish disguises –, in a bar with a typically Andalusian décor. Likewise, in Lunares (2004), wearing the same dress, she pricked her body with needles, letting blood stains appear on her spotless outfit, thus proposing a parallel between the flamenco dancer and the death of a bull in the bullring. Albarracín does not shy away from using herself both physically and morally in her works, even putting herself in danger as illustrated by She Wolf (2006), a re-interpretation of a performance by Joseph Beuys, in which she shares a meal with a wolf. In La Cabra (2001), she performs a dance squeezed tight against a wine skin, whose contents spill over her dress, recalling pagan sacrifices. Rewarded by the Altadis prize in 2002, her works have been shown in many exhibitions, and particularly in Biennials (Seville in 2004, Venice and Moscow in 2005).
Ludovic DELALANDE
See this illustrated text on the website of the Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions
