Born just three years apart on opposite sides of the globe, Liliana Maresca and Gundula Schulze Eldowy were both entered into worlds of political turmoil. Maresca (b. 1951, Avellaneda, Argentina), under the fascistic rule of General Juan Perón (followed by military dictatorship in 1976), and Eldowy (b. 1954, Erfurt, Germany), in GDR controlled East Germany, behind the Iron Curtain. Heavily policed and creatively stifling, these environments nonetheless fuelled the photography of both women, whose trailblazing practices connected under the same roof at this year’s Artissima art fair in Turin.
A multidisciplinary artist who made sculpture, performance and installation as well as photography, Maresca was the figurehead of an underground collective of Buenos Aires artists that sprang to life following the end of military dictatorship in 1983. Like the rest of her eclectic practice, Maresca’s photography was an act of social and political rebellion, often using her own nude body in performative self-portraits that defied traditional feminine expectations and years of state censorship.
In an evocative series of portraits produced with long-term collaborator Marcos López (Liliana Maresca With Her Work, 1983), Maresca poses nude with a collection of her own sculptures. Made using found objects: pieces of furniture, suspension springs and breast plates - perhaps salvaged from her work in stage design - each sculpture is activated by Maresca’s physical engagement with them. Placed between her legs or held in front of her torso, their aura is ambiguous; appearing either as armour - and Maresca as an emblem of autonomy and resilience - or as torture instruments, with the artist’s naked flesh at their mercy.
By intertwining her identity with her artistic production, Maresca reclaims her body from the state’s censors and simultaneously blurs any distinction between creator and subject, between her art and her politics. 'By including herself in the portraits, Maresca is rejecting the commodification of the artist,' explains Heike Munder, co-curator of this year's Back to the Future section at Artissima. 'A lot of feminist artists protested against this all over Europe and Latin America throughout the 70s and 80s, but the radicality of Maresca’s photographs is a direct consequence of the political context in Argentina.'
Nudity, either among her subjects or herself, is used to similar effect in the work of Gundula Schulze Eldowy. In her series, Berlin in a Dog's Night (1977-90), started when she was in her twenties and among her best known works, Eldowy explores the unseen lives of ordinary East Berliners amidst the post-war ruins of their city. Countering official GDR narratives of prosperity and social harmony, these portraits of strangers, often taken in their homes, provide intimate and dignified insights into lives of loneliness, illness, poverty and social decay - the marginalised edges of society redacted from official view.
While she perhaps lacks the more confrontational political approach of Maresca, Eldowy’s photographs from this series nonetheless carry a quiet undertone of dissent. Her gritty, monochrome view of individual suffering represents the antithesis to Socialist Realism’s highly polished aesthetic and, in the access she gained to stranger’s homes, provides an assertion of personal space in a state where privacy was routinely violated. Eldowy’s use of nudity is, like Maresca’s, both a statement of radical honesty amidst endless political corruption and a subversion of restrictive state censorship. But in Berlin in a Dog’s Night especially, the nudity of her subjects reflects an almost corporeal connection between East Berliner's and their city. Vulnerable, worn and exposed, stripped back to the foundations, they are presented as an extension of Berlin’s war-torn urban fabric.
'The political side to her work only emerged in retrospect, after the wall came down [in 1989],' maintains Patrick Ebensperger, whose eponymous gallery exhibited a series of Eldowy's nude portraits at Gallery Weekend Berlin earlier this year. 'At the time she took the photos it was more about getting in touch with the people. It became more political because nudity was seen as an expression of freedom in the former East Germany - there was always a culture of going to the beach naked, so that was an expression of remaining freedom.'
Though Maresca and Eldowy were never acquainted - with Maresca dying of AIDS in 1994 aged 43 - they shared a commitment to channelling resistance and championing the underrepresented in their work. Irrespective of the political obstacles they faced - or perhaps because of them - their photography was honed as a means of protest. In opposition to authoritarianism and censorship, the raw, unfiltered nude body was celebrated by both women as the ultimate expression of individual autonomy.
