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Photographer
Viola Rama
Ultra Venus
Photographer
Viola Rama
Ultra Venus
Photographer
Viola Rama
Ultra Venus
Photographer
Viola Rama
Ultra Venus
Photographer
Viola Rama
Ultra Venus
Photographer
Viola Rama
Ultra Venus
Photographer
Viola Rama
Ultra Venus
Photographer
Viola Rama
Ultra Venus
Photographer
Viola Rama
Ultra Venus
Photographer
Viola Rama
Ultra Venus
Photographer
Viola Rama
Ultra Venus
Gomma Photography Grant 2021 Finalists

Gomma Photography Grant 2021

Ultra Venus

Photographer

Viola Rama

Ultra Venus

03 Feb, 2022

The series Ultra-Venus explores the contemporary obsession with self-modification, the cult of beauty and the power of the destructive obsession it engenders. In the emergent social contexts of a digitized and globalizing world, human bodies are constantly monitored and transformed through their interactions with technology. The compulsion to intervene with and alter ourselves has become an absolute imperative, which in turn produces societies obsession and anxieties about bodily appearance. Employing a satiric wit the project Ultra-Venus presents a bizarre catalogue of portraits, in which the artist photographed herself wearing selected props, beauty tools and devices, designed to improve the body appearance and functionality, such as wigs, compression corsets, body shapers, anti-wrinkle masks, eye massagers, etc. The spectacle of the artist’s body, disguised and transformed through the addition of non-organic components, is used to deconstruct representations of femininity and makes visible the feminine as masquerade and the traditional female relationship between beauty and pain. Every picture reveals a fracture in self-conception and a solitary sense of self, generating a breakdown of the distinction between the beautiful and the grotesque.

About the photographer

Viola Rama

Viola Rama is a photographer and visual artist based between London and Italy. Her body of work explores the intersections between identity and representation, calling into question the oppressive influence of mass-media over our individual and collective identities. Through many variations on the methods of portraiture and self-portraiture she proposes a critique of consumerism, exploring a wide range of common female social roles and stereotypes in order to suggest how self identity is often a precarious compromise between social dictates and personal intention.