Ispodnie (noun, Russian) –

1.Underwear

2.That which is hidden, is covered in mystery (Efremova Dictionary of Russian, 2012)

Today we don’t just wear underwear beneath our clothes. We carry a tapestry woven from insults. This fabric of direct and metaphorical abuse is sewn into our minds and bodies. It is varnished with the gloss of stereotype-enforcing magazines and advertisements. Just as these stereotypes tell us that the “correct” female body must be sexy, so they also give us the tools to create an image of what is “wrong”.

The problem is not the nudity itself but its extreme selectivity, which creates standards, and leads to the complexes we carry.

“To be naked is to be without disguise.

To be on display is to have the surface of one's own skin, the hairs of one's own body, turned into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.”

- John Berger

WHAT SHE WEARS BENEATH is real underwear on a real body, but it is also living words and living complexes. About 70 women from Belarus took part in an open anonymous survey over several days in February 2020. All of their quotes were used in this project. The project starts with a contradiction: the model does not meet the standard of classically eroticised underwear advertising and the product is not attractive and not functional. The subjectivity of the quoted descriptions of the body is emphasized by the inadequacy of the prototype we have selected. Nudity, hiding behind a mask of complexes, becomes even more naked.

The Project exposition for the exhibition WOMEN ART REVOLUTION (2023, Dom Kultury Srodmiescie, Warsaw, Poland) was supplemented with participatory practice,in which participants anonymously shared their experiences and bodily complexes and then painted them as red embroidery on white underwear.The created works became part of the installation.