What would fetishists think of Jacqui Kuraj’s work? Personally I would not show it to them fearing disruptions. Kuraj’s work is about the female condition and cruelty to oneself and to others'.  

This work proposes the concept of another history. that of a stubborn return of mythic figures that re-create and reinsert themselves into other contexts in the transmigratory synthesis of collective obsessions and individual passions. 

Performance artist Jacqui Kuraj presents her body and it’s ritualized mutilation as a critical landscape of sacrifice wherein the mythological souls of martyrs roam the terrain:

A female Christ figure, her stigmata wounds bleeding, initiates her first steps beyond the repression of a homosadistic world and enters the spheres of pure sensation and liberation, and survives.

Ophelia as concubine, her feet bloodied and bound, a cruel ritual of body modification in the name of beauty, that was fetishized and revered for ten centuries in China.

Flayed goddesses sacrificed to the deities to ensure the rebirth of man. The female being revealed in a ritualized landscape of sacrifice.

The dialectic between the earth and the sun, blood and plant growth, stories of God, and the dark seepage of family stuff and sexual intimacies. 

Concubines of China enslaved by mother acting as the keeper of an empirical patriarchy supervised the torture of their daughters' feet to gain primacy. 

Meanings played out by the community through the medium of the human body in each Human sacrifice.   Like Artaud entranced by Tarahumaras, Kuraj probes dualities and pushes relentlessly. From this dissonant clash we have to take heed. To start anew, somehow differently, and within us has to change in an unprecedented way. 

Saints bleed. Kuraj’s realm is the sacrificial landscape.

- Gianfranco Mantegna 

Taormina Arte Video Festival for Contemporanea