A Period Of Concealment

The subject of menstruation isn’t one we mention often on Portable, and, in fact, it isn’t one talked about much at all.  It’s a tad confronting, a little bit mmm…errghh, and a even a kind of “forbidden” subject—we basically like to pretend it doesn’t exist.  Which would be fine, if it wasn’t a reality for more than half the people of the world.  The stigma attached to this innate function of the female body is not widely acknowledged as a part of the beauty of human reproduction, but as a taboo—a contamination of femaleness.

Seven Days of Menstruation is a new video by artist Annie Wong, and, yeah, it’s exactly what it sounds like.  The almost abstract water formations appear intriguing and placid—and yet when we discover that the visuals are delineations of, well, someone’s period in a toilet bowl, our visceral internal reaction is of repulsion.  This substance, here distanced form the body, becomes its own entity and a potent representation of the instinctual reaction to this ‘contaminated’ bodily fluid.   Shot on a macro lens, the five minute silent film allows no reverie from the confrontation of the images.

It seems we are most confronted by the repulsiveness of what our own bodies create.  While we should be used to the bizarre ways of the human body (just think of child birth for a second), our own disgust ironically stems from ourselves.  When artist Andres Serrano created his Piss Christ in 1987 (a small crucifix submerged in his own urine) people were scandalised across the world, and if anyone has seen Stan Brakhange’s Window Water Baby Moving, you’ll know the graphic depiction of the birth of a child is unlike any other media seen before on the subject.

When it comes to menstruation, child birth, and female bodily functions, art tends to shy away.  Yet with this video, Wong becomes one of the few to break the societal conventions of avoidance within private femininity.  Within the unwritten practice of tight-lipped, alluding concealment, this video breaks the period rulebook simply by talking about it.

Details

• Directed by

  Annie Wong

• Release Date

  December 2011