Princess Beauty is a video installation that comprises 5 videos on different screens, a painting (oil on wood, 76 x 67 cm) and a printed reproduction of Lucas Cranach’s portrait of Anna Cuspinian.
The installation is an elaborated version of my 2’ 30” short film titled Princess Beauty that can be watched on this link: https://vimeo.com/512496877
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The title refers to Aliz Mosonyi’s poem, which is a tale about a girl with tulips in her hands. The flowers whisper all kinds of disciplinary orders into her ears. They are trying to tame her to be a well groomed and well behaved lady. The work deals with the conflict between one’s own agency and the physical and mental constraints that are imposed on them. It addresses the protagonist’s attempts to exist in this environment, her emotions and her escape.
The animation is based on my painting that is a collage, a contemporary completion of Cranach’s Anna Cuspinian.
In the 16th century portrait, the weary, defiant woman decorated according to the standards of beauty of her age resonates perfectly with contemporary women commuting around.
As the videos are a combination of 3D animations with physical simulations, a lot of unpredictable, random events and glitchy effects became part of the creative process.
The short film titled Princess Beauty is a sequence of the above mentioned fragments. For the installation, these 3D footages would be rerendered so that their point of view would correspond to their location in the space in a way that the spectator could walk around it, seeing more or less the same thing but from different angles. The sound will be based on the sound of the 2’ 30” video’s sound.
The installation consists of a 65” 4k LCD TV, vertically installed; 3 Hantarex TV-s and a small size digital screen. The painting is installed on the wall, and a print of the Cranach portrait is put on the side of a pedestal under one of the Hantarex TVs and it is lit by a small spot lamp.
More about this work: https://hypeandhyper.com/en/this-years-winner-of-the-leopold-bloom-art-award-eszter-szabo/