During the 1980s and 1990s, Anu Põder’s most prolific period, she developed an approach that utilised mannequins and dolls, a motif frequently used in Surrealism to represent fantasies of cyborgs or automata. Combining representations of fragmented body parts – alternately cut-up, abject, wounded, and incomplete – with often-fragile or ephemeral materials, Põder created a series of sculptures in which representations of the women’s bodies likewise emerge as uncanny doubles, whose very materiality is subject to processes of hybridisation, transformation, and decay, or projections of desire. Before Performance (1981), a life-sized headless mannequin fashioned from textiles and plastic, is covered with measurements related to idealised body proportions, her body divided into zones as if an animal carcass prepared for slaughter by a butcher. As opposed to a body that is about to be cut up, Figure Which Was Made to Walk (1984) is scarcely held together. In With a Trombone from the Gill of Lasnamäe (Pink Bird) (1988), abstracted forms read interchangeably as parts of instruments, limbs, or architectural tubing; the body is pushed further into the realm of the
human-machine.
Madeline Weisburg
