Simona Koutná is an audiovisual artist and writer researching how visual culture constructs the subjectivity of female identity. Her aim is to create space to discuss beauty, gender, and the pressure that is put on women to conform to a certain stereotype. In her practice, she uses a particular skill set, built for visual stimulation, to decode the materials and strategies used by the image-making industry. She explores the means of communication applied the idea of the ‘Self’, making use of lo-fi recording techniques (signaling authenticity) and digitally synthesized visual allegories. She makes repeated use of the clichés of consumer-oriented pop-psychology through an “I” that is both emotive and anonymous, where individual identity is strategically eluded.
In her work, she demonstrates a fascination with the female body—girl’s body, pregnant body, mother’s body—and its relation to constructions of gender. And the biological liquids that circulate it, prostaglandins, tears, saliva, menstrual blood, amniotic fluid, urine, breast milk. She often relates to the notion of the ‘mother’, the idea of a connecting body which includes us, and that suddenly we are divided from—and how this idea is carried by the womb, an object of longing; the connection of a young child to the mother’s body, separated in the moment of recognition of the ‘self’ in the mirror—a moment of solitude, and a moment of loss. She aims to decipher this ambiguous state between solidarity and alienation, that carries out through one’s life.