Prev

Duda Carvalho

Next

Lloyd Foster

Artist Feature

Every week an artist is featured whose single image was published by Der Greif. The Feature shows the image in the original context of the series.

Irina Shkoda - MISERERE

May 26, 2021

As a child, I was to read the psalm of David twice a day, morning and evening, according to the prayer rule.
 
Then I felt my personhood through pain: “…the subject (since Christianity) is the one who suffers. Where there is a wound, there is a subject” says Roland Barthes in “A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments”. Now I am reviewing my memories from new perspectives. But no new self-definition (for example, atheist; feminist; spectator) takes me completely out of the Christian paradigm, where agency derives from pain and trauma.
 
God, as a projection of my rejecting father, made me want to attract attention through sin. The very word “sin” has always had a sexual connotation for me. From the text of New Testament I learned that God did not come to the righteous, but sinners, and this determined the strategy of my behavior for many years. Mary Magdalene became an example I would follow as a woman who lived outside of taboos. Sin was interpreted by me as rebellion, new sincerity, and the right to subjectivity.
 
In this project, I decided to recreate some significant events from my life through photography, to look at them from the outside, as does God I don’t believe in.
 
Each frame corresponds to both a traumatic memory and a line from the psalm.