Spiritual and physical indulgence come together in this suit. It is made to be worn underneath the clothes on the naked body. It contains four vibrators, a vibrating dildo and touch sensors that are situated so as to correspond to the points on the body that are touched when you make a sign of the cross. Touch sensors on the shoulders activate the vibrators placed on the stomach and thighs, while the touch sensor situated on the stomach is directly connected with the dildo.
In ancient civilizations sex was not restricted only to the intimate, but also belonged to the public sphere of life. Numerous religious ecstasies were linked to sexual ecstasy. The orgasm itself, the delight of love-making, was explained through the prism of God. Simultaneously a sensation and an act which creates new life – what could be closer to God than this?
It is very hard to connect spiritual progress and contemporary life style. To satisfy the spiritual, one has to abandon physical indulgence, and to please one’s physical appetites, it is often necessary to ignore the spiritual principles.
The sensors situated at the points that are touched upon making the sign of the cross change this experience, leading you from the spiritual presence of God to a physical sensation. After making love with God, your church visits are never going to be the same again.
The work was produced at the workshop ‘Ecstatic bodies in Cyberspace – on the body politics in art and technology’, which took place in Belgrade in April 2008, and was led by Stahl Stenslie.
Katarina Petrović (RS)
Katarina Petrović (Niš, 1986) is a student at the painting department of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. Spanning various media, her works are informed by a constant desire for revealing the truth, digging for fear, frustrations and desires. This approach has resulted in topics such as painting herself as a victim of rape or as a prostitute, painting Hitler’s portrait in Austria, ordering the slaughter of animals for the sake of art and not food (even though she’s a vegetarian), dealing with homosexual issues in a homophobic environment, creating a suit for masturbation in church. She explores the psychological and social patterns of behavior and the way individuals adopt various roles in order to hide certain aspects of their identity from other people. She has participated in numerous exhibitions in Serbia and is the winner of 2008 KulturKontakt grant for the Summer Academy in Salzburg.
Milan Nenezić (RS)
Milan Nenezić (Belgrade, 1983) graduated in 2008 at the painting department of The Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, as a recipient of the Fund for Young Talents scholarship. He has participated in several group exhibitions. He is currently working on an exhibition of paintings called I’m so beautiful. The moment after. Besides painting, he is interested in music, digital media, manipulation with sound and picture, the role of technology in contemporary art. Playing with the processes of commercialization and with popular culture, he combined explicit pornographic content with scenes from more prosaic everyday reality in the form of a music video. He made a suit for sexual gratification with God. Future plans include the exploration of the role of image within the world of corporations and questioning the image as a powerful instrument in the hands of a subject.
