"I’m not mad. I don’t care." I’ve said those words and I’ve lied about them, like the women who came before me. My grandmother has this slow blink: You can’t tell from any other part of her body that she’s upset, except for the way her eyelashes sweep her lower lids. My mother, too, knows how to contain her emotions in a deliberate and circumscribed manner.
Likewise, writer and performance artist Kate Durbin choreographed a public art piece in Union Square Friday that represents how smartphones intersect with the fraught relationship between women’s inner emotional worlds and their outer embodied manifestations. Durbin had more than a dozen young women take to the park, in identical wigs, white sport bras, and underpants, Hello Kitty stickers stuck to their limbs, to selfie (if that’s even a verb) for an hour straight. Durbin was their goth queen mother taking selfies alongside them in a black-and-white Hello Kitty dress and long white wig. #helloselfienyc was the second iteration of a performance Durbin first did in LA’s Chinatown back in July. In both performances, the women were instructed not the speak to the audience directly. They could only communicate through their phones. Durbin described the piece as “passive aggressive performance art.”
As I watched the women IRL, I also checked the URLs they were sharing their selfies at, like the event’s Facebook page. I very closely watched Labanna Babalon squat on top of her phone to frame some upskirt-style shots, but I never noticed the period-blood stain on her crotch until I looked later at the selfie she posted. Surprisingly, a lot of the women later talked about feeling extreme emotions. From the outside looking in, they mostly looked bored. One woman told me she was so overwhelmed “but not in a bad way” that she almost cried and her chin started quivering. I’m not sure any of the audience crowding around the half-naked girls noticed a chin quivering just like I’m pretty sure my grandfather rarely notices my grandmother’s slow blink.
The “Hello Selfie” performance exemplified how smartphones provide another posture of indifference for young women—try not to cry or look awkward, just stare at your phone and pretend you’re reading a text message—but also an outlet for sad girls who don’t get to be sad except for online. Feeling shitty? 'Gram a pouty photo. Online, you can see someone’s insides from the outside.
The gaze has long been a hinge or pivot point for the internal and external. Hannah Wilke’s performances often got at those murky spaces between the binaries of artist/subject, inside/outside, and body/self—how they inform each other and fold in on each other. “Through her myriad and often contradictory presentations of herself, Wilke solicits this gaze,” writes Amelia Jones, “grafting it onto and into her body/self, taking hold of it and reflecting it back to expose and exacerbate its reciprocity.” With her selfie-centered project, Durbin updates the exploration of these spaces for the 2.0 generation.![]()
Writer and performance artist Kate Durbin's #helloselfienyc, a choreographed public art piece, got at exactly how smartphones intersect with the fraught relationship between women’s inner emotional worlds and their outer embodied manifestations. Photos
Likewise, writer and performance artist Kate Durbin choreographed a public art piece in Union Square Friday that represents how smartphones intersect with the fraught relationship between women’s inner emotional worlds and their outer embodied manifestations. Durbin had more than a dozen young women take to the park, in identical wigs, white sport bras, and underpants, Hello Kitty stickers stuck to their limbs, to selfie (if that’s even a verb) for an hour straight. Durbin was their goth queen mother taking selfies alongside them in a black-and-white Hello Kitty dress and long white wig. #helloselfienyc was the second iteration of a performance Durbin first did in LA’s Chinatown back in July. In both performances, the women were instructed not the speak to the audience directly. They could only communicate through their phones. Durbin described the piece as “passive aggressive performance art.”
As I watched the women IRL, I also checked the URLs they were sharing their selfies at, like the event’s Facebook page. I very closely watched Labanna Babalon squat on top of her phone to frame some upskirt-style shots, but I never noticed the period-blood stain on her crotch until I looked later at the selfie she posted. Surprisingly, a lot of the women later talked about feeling extreme emotions. From the outside looking in, they mostly looked bored. One woman told me she was so overwhelmed “but not in a bad way” that she almost cried and her chin started quivering. I’m not sure any of the audience crowding around the half-naked girls noticed a chin quivering just like I’m pretty sure my grandfather rarely notices my grandmother’s slow blink.
The “Hello Selfie” performance exemplified how smartphones provide another posture of indifference for young women—try not to cry or look awkward, just stare at your phone and pretend you’re reading a text message—but also an outlet for sad girls who don’t get to be sad except for online. Feeling shitty? 'Gram a pouty photo. Online, you can see someone’s insides from the outside.
The gaze has long been a hinge or pivot point for the internal and external. Hannah Wilke’s performances often got at those murky spaces between the binaries of artist/subject, inside/outside, and body/self—how they inform each other and fold in on each other. “Through her myriad and often contradictory presentations of herself, Wilke solicits this gaze,” writes Amelia Jones, “grafting it onto and into her body/self, taking hold of it and reflecting it back to expose and exacerbate its reciprocity.” With her selfie-centered project, Durbin updates the exploration of these spaces for the 2.0 generation.
Writer and performance artist Kate Durbin's #helloselfienyc, a choreographed public art piece, got at exactly how smartphones intersect with the fraught relationship between women’s inner emotional worlds and their outer embodied manifestations. Photos