born 1991 in Gdańsk
A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. She is active in the fields of video art and sculpture and an author of Foundfootage music video (2014) realised in cooperation with the singer Miron.
In her work the artist discusses the issues of social acceptance for disability and relations between art and pop culture. By using the language of advertising, she unmasks the canon of contemporary beauty, where physical imperfections or injuries are a taboo and the body is treated as a commercial product. Formella ridicules pop culture patterns, deconstructing the mechanisms behind them and raises the question as to whether the fully fit majority has the right to set standards of what is attractive as well as what would be the ideal of beauty if disabled people were to decide about it.
Barbara Formella, Beautiful Deformations, 2015
installation: video, objects
The installation Beautiful Deformations comprises five sculptures in the form of deformed hands, made of resin and metal, as well as a three-channel video projection, which follows an advertising convention in merchandising a line of commercial goods. The shapes of the prostheses bring to mind hands deformed by phocomelia, a disorder caused by thalidomide, a popular medicine in Europe in the second half of the 20th century (taken by pregnant women, it caused untypical congenital defects among thousands of children). The intricate manner of execution and the material that glitters with hues of black and gold situate the object in the category of exclusive and impractical jewellery rather than a functional imitation of healthy limbs. The work by Formella demonstrates the deformed hands in a perverse way as objects of desire, fetishes, whose possession and display turns into a snobbish pleasure.
