Mobile Female Monument

Mobile Female Monument

Mimosa Pale

Mobile Female Monument, 2007
From the artist’s website:
An interactive performance sculpture on wheels. Was on show, may 2007, in Tennispalatsi Art Museum Helsinki, and was taken for a walk from there every second day. Passers by could enter the sculpture, there was enough space for an adult to lie down. The “pussy wagon” as people started to call it, was made of silicone and foam plastic, inside upholstery was made of satin. When lying inside one could play the strings that were tensioned from one wall to the other. Also people outside could rock the soft sculpture from outside, which made a special experience for the one lying inside.

From Helsinki Times
The awarding of an aesthetics prize to Mobile Female Monument, a larger-than-life sculpture on wheels depicting the female genitalia by artist Mimosa Pale, has sparked intense debate on the Helsingin Sanomat Internet message board.

The Finnish Society for Aesthetics granted its “Aesthetic Act of the Year” award to the massive pink silicone vagina that moves on wheels. The work has sparked strong opinions both pro and con…

The panel of the Finnish Society for Aesthetics found that Mobile Female Monument is “a surrealistic and at the same time a very human work of art, which speaks simultaneously of public and personal space. Viewed from afar, the Gogolesque giant nose on wheels is revealed on closer inspection to be a woman’s organ of giving birth. Pale invites passers-by to crawl into the work and to be reborn.”

The panel also found that the work, which appears to be provocative, turns into a statement on the beauty of the event of birth, and on looking at the world through fresh eyes.

“As its name suggests, Pale’s work is a feminine monument, which challenges the masculine tradition of public sculpture. The antithesis of a stationary erect stone slab is a work that is soft and mobile.”

“Through its subject matter it also directly confronts the advertising imagery that has grown to gigantic size in our environment”, the panel says.

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