Let Women Decompose in Peace
2024-25
Credits: Namseun Grok
Art history and cinema have long fetishized these bodies: dissected to be understood, staged to be desired, purified through drowning, exalted into saints. Their deaths are aestheticized; their voices erased. Even in disappearance, women are denied the right to decay.
In this work, I return to John Everett Millais’ painting Ophelia. Traditionally celebrated as a vision of serene, idealized femininity, Ophelia floats untouched: a “beautiful dead,” washed clean of the violence that killed her. Instead of preserving her, I allow her to rot. Flowers blacken and collapse; mold spreads from a sealed jar through a system of tubes, contaminating the painted body. The glass case — a device meant to protect artworks — becomes a controlled ecosystem for decomposition. Spikes prevent anyone from rescuing her. No hand may touch her again.
Decomposition becomes liberation.
By letting Ophelia decay, I remove the painter’s desire, the voyeuristic gaze, the patriarchal fantasy of a passive female body. I disrupt the iconography that eroticizes death, that grants purity to saints and shame to prostitutes, that renders some women worthy of mourning and others invisible.
This installation proposes a new image:
a woman who is no longer a muse, nor an object, nor a symbol —
but a body reclaiming itself, even in death.
Let women decompose in peace.
03- Exhibition / Press
Presque Demain, Intersect Paris
25-30/09/2025, Wilde le Lieu
Open to exhibitions and collaborations.