‘Anger detracts from her beauty’ is a well-known Polish saying. I heard it often when I was a little girl, most often from my mother, who probably heard it from hers. This aphorism carries with it the admonition that anger makes a woman ugly. And, of course, ugliness is the very worst attribute that a woman can be branded with. The depiction of female anger as irrational, hysterical, and just plain ugly has a long tradition: from harpies, witches, and Medusa, to young girls inculcated to be polite and smiling, to memes of raging feminists and the so-called Resting Bitch Face syndrome. In this project, I analyse the symbolism and stereotypes associated with female anger by setting them within the context of my own personal story of a rage suppressed, held in, and passed down from generation to generation in my family.
Weronika Perłowska graduated in photography from the University of Fine Arts in Poznań, and is a graduate of the Sputnik Photos collective’s Mentoring Programme. Her works have been exhibited at the Circulation(s) Festival in Paris (2020), Ardesia Projects in Berlin (2019), the Lumix Festival in Hanover (2018), and the FOCUS Photography Festival in Mumbai (2017). She is interested in manipulating images and symbols in order to scrub them of preconceptions and stereotypes.
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