Pardon My Body was part of Skuja Braden’s first solo exhibition with kaufmann repetto, presented across the gallery’s New York and Milan venues. The exhibition brought together two distinct yet interconnected projects, introducing the work of the Latvian-American collaborative duo to the gallery.
The New York presentation, Pardon My Body, brought together works from the artists’ residency in California between 2001 and 2008 with works created during their fifteen years living in the Latvian countryside. The exhibition reflected on experiences of restricted bodily autonomy across different social and political contexts, shaped by American immigration policy on the one hand and Latvian homophobia on the other. Throughout the exhibition, the private and public were intertwined, exploring the ways in which individual experiences of the body are shaped by larger structures of power and society.
The different socio-political spheres of men and women and their relationship to power were addressed through the double entendre of Cock Block. Women’s reproductive and sexual freedom was explored in Still Life, a bouquet of bronzed tampons, as well as in Ball and Chain and Pocket Book, where the vagina was playfully represented as an egg.
The ongoing Babies series consists of large-scale sculptures that act as vehicles for multiple, often opposing ideas. Spanning more than two decades, the series ranges from the early Flower Child, created in a moment of distress following George W. Bush’s election in 2000, partly supported by people who had been hippies in the 1960s, to the more recent Flower Power. The latter is a large lingam-shaped vessel covered in rafflesia flowers with vulva-shaped centres. By transforming the simplified form of the phallus into a backdrop for the surrounding flowers, the work playfully subverts its conventional association with masculine power.