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Ordinary Voyeurism – A Woman, Central Station L´viv

Ordinary Voyeurism – A Woman, Central Station L´viv
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    • Ordinary Voyeurism – A Woman, Central Station L´viv
  • 1996
  • video, color, sound
  • 2min, 28sec
For her series "Ordinary Voyeurism," Anna Daučíkovà filmed in various locations all over the world during the 1990s and 2000s. Equipped with a voyeuristic camera of sorts, the artist ventured out to capture everyday scenes in a very direct manner. Her series opens up space for interpretation and for the production of new meanings; in doing so, her intent is to supplant the sexual lust that is attributed to the voyeuristic gaze. She replaces said lust with her desire to embed a quasi-innocent fragment of reality in a political context. Her videos concentrate on the body or bodies seen in public in order to ask how self-assertion and exclusion from the public realm are of significance for women. And in this brief sequence that she shot at the main railway station in L’viv, Daučíková—wielding her camera at close range—focuses on a young woman of rural appearance who is evidently waiting for somebody. Her beautiful face exhibits a wait-and-see expression; she seems worried and uncertain. Passengers and the occasional policeman walked past her. The matters of who she is and for what she is waiting remain open. In light of present-day knowledge concerning the fate of people in Ukraine and the importance of the main railway station in L’viv to war refugees, this young woman comes to symbolize an entire country’s vulnerability and unprotectedness. S.E.