"Warte Mal!": construction and consumption of female subjectivity after the velvet revolution

Abstract

This paper revisits the politics of representation debates' post-1989 in relation to Ann-Sofi Sidén’s Warte Mal! Prostitution after the Velvet Revolution (1999). It seeks to address the manner in which the political is thought through the aesthetic, focusing specifically on the mediums of the video camera and the diary as research tools in producing a reconfigured essayistic narrative. This device, I propose seeks to understand an altered subjectivity, its production and consumption in the transition from one socio-economic and political system to another. The work shows a demand for a new type of critical cultural production in the face of the ubiquity of the image in the 21st century and its power, when harnessed by governmental or institutional restrictions, to render lived complexities as static moments confined to narratives of victimization which divert attention away from large-scale historical processes (the cultural, economic, political and social components) that drive women to work in enslaved positions in the sex industry. Boris Groys’ focus on the role of documentation as art and its biopolitical contingencies in his work for Documenta 11 (2002) and his book Art Power (2008) provides the theoretical underpinnings of the paper.