Zarina Nares
How To Be THAT Girl, 2022
Video, TRT 18:56 Looped
Feminine identity forms through intimacy with the feminine. This intimacy resides within yet is permeated by the external expectations of ‘woman.’ Influencer content, reality TV and online porn are media by which we are offered a peek into another’s life; the intimacy of the digital world. In my life, the media which play with that intimacy hold special power over the formation of feminine identity. In the video art piece “How To Be THAT Girl,” the vlog itself is forced to confront emotions entrenched in the relationship between media and the feminine identity. The piece explores this confrontation through the transmutation of tragedy into comedy, speediness into slowness, and saturation into meditation. Simultaneous cry-ability and laugh-ability integrate this duality, fusing light and dark as a practice of self-love, which is the purpose of my art. A vlog walks into a bar… and goes on a revelatory psychedelic trip.