lower your ambitions, 2015

Kasia Fudakowski, lower your ambitions (Green), 2015, Hand made mop with dyed cotton, with bucket, mop: 147 × 29 × 8 cm; bucket: 25 × 38 × 29 cm

Acting like a kind of memento mori, “lower your ambition” is an anthropomorphised mop, with a stern face and withering look, reminding one not to ‘reach for the stars’. It embodies the antithesis of Cinderella’s glass slipper, and was used as a prop during the performance and exhibition ‘Sexistinnen’, originally shown at Art Basel Statement in 2015, before travelling to several further exhibitions. The ‘mop’ was a central instrument to the shameful behaviour of the main characters of the mis en scene, the Artist and her Gallerist, both female and both following typical sexist patterns: assertions of incompetence; competitiveness between themselves; the construction of women as objects and the invalidation or belittling of women.