Feminist phenomenologists challenge traditional Western phenomenological frameworks contingent on a mind/body and nature/culture dichotomy. This Western inclination to categorize concepts into binary opposites reflects the perennial gendered way of thinking, where the mind and culture are typically linked to masculinity, while the body and nature are associated with femininity. One could argue that this dichotomy perpetuates gender disparities and disregards the importance of embodied experiences. Feminist phenomenologists’ attunement to embodied experiences as a unified whole and the vitality of matter results in an awareness of the intricate connection between bodies, power, and agency. Rather than adhering to a binary framework, feminist phenomenology explores how social and political forces regulate, control, and shape bodies and matter. Power operates through and upon materiality, thus instigating strategies for resisting or reshaping this power.
British artist Rosie Gibbens (b. 1993) exposes and investigates the power dynamics smoldering within contemporary society. Dissecting the overlaps between consumer desire, sexual politics, and gender performativity, Gibbens, through her practice, examines ways in which bodies are perceived and the dynamics of looking and being looked at through an absurd and humoristic lens. Everyday objects such as a drill, toothbrush, and photocopier provide a locus for Gibbens to produce performance pieces that expose their changing position by turning the found objects into bodily experiments, theatrical spectacles, and material bodies. Recognized as one of the notable emerging British artists to watch, Gibbens follows the footsteps of Britain’s tradition of era-defining young artists, comparable to the Young British Artists (YBAs) of the 1990s, such as Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin, and Gillian Wearing.[1] Like these celebrated artists, Gibbens incorporates humor, performance, elements of the daily, and political undertones into her artistic practice.
By drawing attention to the everyday and the instability of the objects, Gibbens makes the conventional split between subject and object impossible. Her performances establish a space where material objects and the human subject interact in ways that are deeply intimate, bodily, and unpredictable. As a result, these objects transform into a materiality that defies normative binary dichotomies, acquiring their own inherent agency and power. I had the pleasure of speaking with Gibbens in July, a month after she had given birth, in which our conversation was centered on her two most recent works, Parabiosis (2024) and Planned Obsolescence (2023), power dynamics, cuteness, fetishism, pregnancy, and the paradox of simultaneously gaining and losing control.
Olivia Turner Saul (OTS): Where does your interest in consumer desire, especially the feminist theoretical aspects of your practice, stem from?
Rosie Gibbers (RG):” It began because I was making costumes about ten years ago, turning my body into different household objects. For example, I had one where I became a shower and one where I became a mop (a lot of them were cleaning-related). To start with, I was just being quite playful with my body. Then, the more I conceptualized what I was doing, the more I started to think about objectifying people or personifying objects and the crossover between those. I also thought more about what it meant to use my body, a female-identifying one, and dug into that further in relation to objectification and gender performativity.
In terms of consumer desire, it came firstly from a real joy in products, especially in things with niche or complicated uses. I made chain reactions with objects, so their uses were not as the manufacturer intended. Through that, I started to think of the objects as commodities and began incorporating a parody teleshopping vibe. I thought of myself as demonstrating absurd merchandise in the performances. These ‘products’ were usually linked to ideas around optimization, which came through the found objects I appropriated. For example, exercise equipment that promises to improve your body or domestic gadgets that promise to streamline your chores. These examples are also traditionally gendered forms of labor”.
Professor Maurizia Boscagli explores the transformative properties of objects in Stuff Theory. She discusses how modern individuals perceive material objects in a subjective, abstract, and bodily manner. In this theory, humans simultaneously exert power over and are controlled by untranscended matter. This theory highlights the complex and dynamic relationship between humans and the material world, where we exert control over objects while also being influenced and constrained by them.[2] Gibbens performance pieces expose the transformative qualities of objects and the magic that happens when organic and inorganic materials intersect and collaborate in their becoming. In Gibbens’ piece Auto Erotic Assimilation (2018), a 45-minute ‘product demonstration’, Gibbens humorously and grotesquely applies makeup with mechanical tools: “I often use power tools in ways different to their intended function. From a practical point of view, these mechanical tools are a simple way to motorize and ‘bring to life’ inanimate objects. I create ‘chain reactions’ that achieve simple or pointless tasks in complicated ways.”[3] Gibbens uses a drill/toothbrush to apply lipstick and mascara, a blender and a protractor for her blush, and a vacuum for her hair. Gibbens surrealistic approach and reconfiguration of everyday objects conjure similarities to the late artist Méret Oppenheim’s (b.1913-1985) surrealist quasi-objects, i.e., Object, 1936, the canonic fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon or My Nurse, a pair of white high heels bound resembling a trussed chicken.
Her intentional misuse of everyday objects, mechanical and analog technologies designed to optimize our lives, often with limited lifespans, initially shiny and new but quickly discarded, reflects Boscagli’s concept of materiality, highlighting the oscillating relationship between people and the things they use. Boscagli names this new materiality stuff: “Matter whose plasticity and transformative potential emerge inextricably with the human. The notion of the human as participating in matter, and the idea of the human-object connection as a technogenesis rather than a narrative of origins and domination […]”[4] Boscagli notes that this new plastic materiality situated in the realm of the everyday is part of our contemporary culture of capital, where artefactual matter will always be a commodity. In a perverse reversal, Gibbens advances the understanding of technogenesis by anthropomorphizing objects and objectifying subjects.
OTS: What were your initial concepts and thoughts behind the performance Planned Obsolescence, and could you elaborate on the relationship between analog and digital mediums in your practice?
RG: “It was part of a bigger series involving photographs, sculptures, and performances featuring printers. It started when I was paired with Helen Chadwick for a show. I was particularly inspired by her photocopy works in The Oval Court.
I began by thinking about the old joke of the office worker photocopying their body parts. It’s a way of inserting the absurd, and possibly sexual, body into ‘professional’ space and time, which interests me. I made sculptures and performances where bodies melded into printers, becoming low-tech cyborgs. I was also thinking about the frustration of malfunctioning printers. The title, Planned Obsolescence refers to products designed to fail after a certain period, forcing you to buy new ones. I was thinking about this in relation to our bodies being controlled by corporations designing our future technological extensions.
The performance also used Xerox scanners and 3D photogrammetry scans to create layers of ‘digital skin’, which I wore as a costume. The grey and white checkered fabric in work symbolizes negative space, like the deleted area in Photoshop. It’s like a layer underneath the skin or the idea of deleting oneself. This combines technological and analog elements, becoming like a fabric picnic blanket pattern IRL. Analog or mechanical technologies are used, but they also contrast with more digital elements. There’s not a hierarchy in my mind. I’m interested in using low-tech or outdated technology to look at future technology. For example, the skiing machine in Parabiosis is really old and clunky. I’m using it to think about ideas for the future of the pregnant body, which is very high-tech”.
As Gibbens references, in Planned Obsolescence, the body sculptures are covered in a generic transparency grid (the generic checkered PNG pattern). They are merged with office appliances like printers and scanners. Simultaneously, Gibbens dons a skirt suit adorned with images of her own body parts, in which she moves between standing on an outdated Gym Master vibration plate and scanning various parts of her body on a photocopier. In Planned Obsolescence, Gibbens blurs the distinctions between subject and object, body and material, and dominant and subordinate. In doing so, she challenges the power dynamics that usually separate the technological from the analog, commodity from junk, and optimization from degradation. By subverting the conventional notion that organic and inorganic materials are inherently opposed, Gibbens instead presents them as extensions of one another. Within a Boscaglian framework, Gibbens recasts the encounter between subjects and the material world; her performing body becomes a hybrid subject-object, and fabric sculptures and electric appliances become corporeal.[5] Boscagli shifts the focus from the broader concept of matter to the more specific idea of stuff, stuff referring to objects that were once desirable and shiny but have shed their allure and value. Although these objects have lost their glamour and their promise of optimization, we are still reluctant to dispose of them, holding onto them because “[…] stuff is the expendable and necessary appendix that tells us that we exist and function, and yet weighs us down […] these are the prosthetic things that fill our pockets and purses, closets and trunks with which we furnish the self and the spaces we inhabit.”[6] Stuff inhabits a potential for identity building, resonating with Gibbens own comment on her practice “My work is about how we use things around us to construct our identity and sense of belonging, linking to gender, desire, and other themes.”[7]
OTS: Do you see your props and tools as objects, subjects, or somewhere in between?
RG: “Probably both. With the product demonstration mindset, the audience are almost like prospective buyers, so the props are objects or imagined commodities. But I also see my sculptures as puppets or avatars of myself who confront the viewer. So, in my mind they also have agency and ‘subjecthood’”.
In her work, Gibbens uses absurdity and the nonsensical to expose the inherent nature of matter, reviving objects’ fetishistic qualities. This approach, shared by contemporaries such as Anna Uddenberg and Marie Munk, transforms the object into something fetishized, highly stylized, and sometimes even abject.[8] Fetishism in this context refers to Walter Benjamin’s writing on how objects are imbued with exaggerated significance or value within a capitalist context. Commodities acquire a ‘sex appeal’ or libidinal charge, influencing our desire and shaping our subjective experience.[9] Also, one could argue that Gibbens’ work evokes what Benjamin defines as the “cultic value” of art. The fetishized object takes on a ritualistic dimension, like a sacred relic; thereby, the cultic value, derived from an object’s aura, is present not only in the object’s material qualities but also in the way it is presented as an artifact with an almost mystical allure.[10]
VIDEO rosie gibbe_1080p
Thus, Gibbens reveals through her props the aestheticization and position of objects within the cycle of commodity circulation and uncovers their seductive nature and tactility. In Planned Obsolescence, three bizarre but sleek infomercials promoting a “Super Stylish and Efficient Cleaning Outfit,” a “Relaxation and Wellness Machine,” and an “Ultimate Cleaning Brush Machine” are displayed on separate screens. The infomercials are accompanied by a soothing, repetitive, synthesized background tune, starkly contrasting the outdated, clunky technology in the performance.
Gibbens engages with the contradictions of commodification and consumerism through the performance’s juxtaposition of the objects’ cultic aura and mundane utility. Boscagli highlights how Benjamin problematizes this paradox within the framework of stuff, where the Western subject encounters the object, revealing the subject’s weakness before the commodity’s allure, but also “the frailty of that allure once the commodity lapses into the quasi-commodification of the marked-down, second-hand unfashionable – that is, once it becomes stuff.”[11]Planned Obsolescence exemplifies this tension, with Gibbens acting as both subject and object in her interaction with material, being both observer and observed. Boscagli, drawing on Benjamin, notes: “Instead of being seduced by the sex appeal of the inanimate, so that he becomes himself frozen into thingness, the subject is fascinated and made alive by the wonders that the object, now re-envisioned as an object closer to the anthropological fetish or medieval relic, can perform.”[12]
Gibbens is animated by objects (the photocopier, the printer, the office chair) and, in turn, animates them. While the conventional view of materiality opposes humans and objects, Benjamin’s notion of fetishism embraces fluidity and movement, envisioning an exchange between matter and spirit that dissolves the boundaries between human and thing, subject and object. In Gibbens’s practice, fetishism encompasses both economic and erotic commentary, as both address themes of desire, power, and the exaggerated importance of objects and symbols in the human experience. The cultic value of these objects, then, is not merely their commodified allure but their transformation into symbols of ritual and meaning beyond their original function.[13]
OTS: Could you share how elements of desire and fetishism are integrated into your work and elaborate on your thoughts behind the ‘costumes’ when you portray these stereotypically sexualized feminine personas?
RG: “I often use aesthetic references to fetish or objects associated with sex. For example, PVC, nipple tassels, harnesses, and sex toys. However, this context is usually skewed by combining them with other jarring references like to the medical, childish, corporate or maternal. I hope to alter the way a sexualized body is read using humor.
I also love the playful campiness of some fetish wear, for example in Hellraiser [British supernatural horror film from 1987]. These also link to the abject and the grotesque in my mind. In terms of the clothes I wear, these often link to stereotypes of femininity. For example, the sexualized nurse or office worker are fetishized. These are over-the-top unreal images of womanhood that nevertheless affect identity construction”.
Gibbens’ piece Parabiosis embodies what I term the ‘feminist paradox’, a concept rooted in the work of posthuman scholar Rosi Braidotti. As Gibbens notes in our interview, she simultaneously portrays the stereotypical feminized woman and a version of the post-feminine technological body, reflecting the postmodern shift away from fixed notions of body and gender. The archetypal normative representation of the female gender is the pregnant body, symbolizing the gestation of new life and its inherent potential. In Parabiosis, Gibbens performs while visibly pregnant, her honey-colored hair in a Rapunzel-length braid, complemented by her signature nude pumps. However, her actual pregnant belly was encased in a fabric-padded cast; on the surface, a small red baby skeleton is depicted, mirroring the full-sized red puppeteered skeleton suspended from the ceiling in the exhibition space. Gibbens saw herself as a pregnant robot, where she performs with a relic of a ski machine and a spinal pain inversion table. Analog exercise machines become an extension of Gibbens’ pregnant body, a low-tech feminist cyborg that challenges the conventional fragile approach to the pregnant woman.
Braidotti juxtaposes the tension between feminist nostalgia and euphoria, revealing contradictions in contemporary gender politics. Our understanding of gender has evolved alongside technology, shaping our vision and representation of the gendered techno-body.[14] During modernity, machines and technology were often assigned gendered traits, as seen in films like Metropolis (1927), Cherry 2000 (1987), and The Stepford Wives (1975), which depicted sexy, erotic, and submissive female robots in contrast to The Terminator (1984), The Car (1977), and HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which embodied aggressive, logical, and protective male attributes.
However, in postmodernity, technology has become enmeshed and intraconnected with human corporeality and experience, leading to more fluid and indeterminate depictions of gender.[15] The cyborg now serves as a feminist and queer symbol of the ungendered body, where new technologies offer the potential to transcend conventional gender roles, for instance, through artificial gestation or the internet’s capacity to enable an ungendered digital existence. Braidotti notes, “In post-modernity, however, this ratio changes: electronic and digital machinery are figures of complexity, mixture, hybridity, and interconnectivity. As such, they are not associated with either gender, nor are they particularly sexualized: they mark instead a space of sexual indeterminacy, undecidability or transsexuality.”[16] Despite the above shift in feminist and queer theory towards gender hybridity, trans-species, and the demolition of conventional gender roles, there is also a return to the earthly feminist nostalgia, emphasizing a more holistic and ‘healing’ approach to femininity.[17]
VIDEO: parabiosis 1080p
OTS: In some of your previous interviews, you talk about low-tech cyborgs and blending humans and objects. Can you elaborate?
RG: “We are cyborgs when we use tools that extend the body’s capabilities. This becomes heightened as technology advances. I’m slightly skeptical about the cyborg as a feminist symbol due to its ties to corporations that control the technology. It links to Claire Horn’s book [Eve, 2023] about artificial wombs. This incredible potential tech could be revolutionary for birthing people’s rights, and yet Horn also examines the myriad ways that it could be used to control women’s bodies further. I’m ambivalent about the cyborg idea, but I love it aesthetically and as a symbol. I admire artists like Lee Bul and H.R. Giger, and I’m drawn to science fiction”.
Braidotti suggests that there is a re-emphasis on traditional, essentialist views on femineity, where, e.g., motherhood and femininity are perceived as inherently connected to nature. However, this still reinforces a phallocentric system, upholding classical masculine structures of power and ideology. Simultaneously, in light of neo-capitalism and the techno-industrial market, the maternal is being commodified through alternative modes of reproduction (IVF, surrogacy, etc.) in addition to ‘gadgetfying’ the maternal experience.[18] I view Parabiosis as an exaggerated yet illustrative commentary on the influence of techno-capitalism on pregnancy, as well as how consumer culture shapes our perceptions of parenthood and gestation. [19] This commentary reflects the internal contradictions within feminism, where the female body under advanced capitalism is at once empowered and exploited.
VIDEO: The new me 1
OTS: This brings me to our last question, something I have been wondering: do you see your work as political, or do you want it to be seen that way? Do you consider yourself a political artist?
RG: “I think my work reflects feminist issues and relates to the politics of bodies. I see myself within the lineage of feminist performance, particularly those upending the ‘object/ subject’ dynamic in the 70s. However, my primary intention is not an activist one, the work doesn’t tell people how to think or offer answers. It’s a sprawling conceptual exploration of my own experiences and observations”.
Gibbens at once becomes a sexualized object dressed in pumps and a lab coat, simultaneously exerting power and control of her own body. Gibbens pokes fun at the de-sexualization of the pregnant body, her bra equipped with pacifiers, leading one’s thoughts to nipple tassels, her pregnant body presenting itself paradoxically as a nurturing sacred object and an erotic, powerful subject. Gibbens instead weaponizes the maternal body through performance, where the maternal usually invites us to look inwards to the domestic realms of home and family; Gibbens takes maternal action by performing and participating in the external world, extending care beyond her own body, taking agency and moving the domestic to the public sphere. As noted by Lena Šimic´ and Emily Underwood-Lee in Mothering Performance, “Performance connects with the sense of human agency and engages with the frame of artistic representation which means it is interested in its own reflection, and therefore the potential to re-configure itself, to offer oneself a new narrative. Mothering performance is about taking care of one’s appearance, agency, and action in the social and political realm.”[20]
VIDEO: The New Me 2
OTS: I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the concepts of control and power in relation to your pregnancy. Although I haven’t experienced pregnancy myself, many of my friends have described it as a feeling that something foreign has taken over their bodies. How has your experience been in this regard?
RG: “Some people speak about pregnancy as though the baby is a parasite feeding off your body. I can empathize with this! But I also felt really powerful! The Parabiosis show was both about the experience of my body changing and about theories of the future of birth, particularly the artificial womb. The idea of technological separation from the very physical, embodied experience of pregnancy captivated me. In the performance, I played the part of a birthing robot, and the sculptures were like strange, artificially built wombs. This felt fitting with my interest in the machine-body relationship and in future body scenarios. I had a large red skeleton that I puppeteered and a small one on the bump, representing a circular connection between me and my ‘robot’ child”.
By accentuating the fluid and often contradictory relationship between human bodies and the material world, Gibbens reveals how both can be controlled and manipulated and resist the systems that seek to define them. This synthesis destabilizes the conventional associations of femininity with nurturing and passivity and offers a radical reimagining of the body as a site of agency and vulnerability. Exposing the artificiality of the boundaries we place between these categories, she opens new possibilities for understanding how we navigate the world. Both as subjects and objects within a capitalist system that persistently commodifies everything it touches upon. Gibbens’ work is not just a critique but a celebration of the potential for resistance and transformation.
Experience Rosie Gibbens’ performance exhibition at Friisland, Center for Performance Art from the 21st of November to December 18th. Opening and performance Thursday. November 21st at 5-8 PM.
Experience Rosie Gibbens performance Parabiosis at Arken Museum for Contemporary Art, November 16th
Talk with Rosie Gibbens, moderated by Olivia Turner Saul at Rum for Æstetik, November 20th
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, and Howard Eiland. Harvard University Press, 2008. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1nzfgns.
Boscagli, Maurizia. Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism. New York London New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.
Braidotti, Rosi. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2006.
Frankel, Eddy. “The Future of London Art.” Time Out, n.d. https://www.timeout.com/london/art/best-young-artists-future-of-london-art.
Horn, Claire. Eve: The Disobedient Future of Birth. London: Profile Books, 2023.
Mothering Performance: Maternal Action. London: Taylor et Francis, 2022.
Tank Magazine. “Rosie Gibbens: Low-Tech Feminisms,” 2024.
Further reading
The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson
Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter, Karen Barad
Eve, Claire Horn
The Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway
[1] Eddy Frankel, “The Future of London Art,” Time Out, n.d., https://www.timeout.com/london/art/best-young-artists-future-of-london-art.
[2] Maurizia Boscagli, Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism (New York London New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).
[3] Tank Magazine, “Rosie Gibbens: Low-Tech Feminisms,” 2024.
[4] Boscagli, Stuff Theory. 2
[5] Boscagli. 2-3
[6] Boscagli. 5
[7] Interview with Rosie Gibbens, Olivia Turner
[8] See Anna Uddenberg’s performance piece Economy Plus (2023), thematically centered on similar themes, e.g. consumerism, office culture and fetishized objects, and Marie Munk’s Cable-to-Cradle, sculptural installation commenting on artificial gestation and speculative consumerist technologies
[9] 181-182
[10] Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, and Howard Eiland (Harvard University Press, 2008)
[11] Boscagli, Stuff Theory. 28
[12] Boscagli. 50
[13] Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, and Howard Eiland (Harvard University Press, 2008)
[14] Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2006). 47-50
[15] I have developed the concept of intraconnection by drawing on Karen Barad’s notion of intra-action. Barad’s term, introduced within her framework of agential realism, describes the mutual constitution of entities through their relationships. Unlike interaction, where independent entities pre-exist and then engage with each other, intra-action suggests that entities emerge and take form through their relational entanglements.
[16] Braidotti, Transpositions. 49
[17] Braidotti.50
[18] Braidotti.
[19] Braidotti.
[20] Mothering Performance: Maternal Action (London: Taylor et Francis, 2022). 6