Nights You Spent without Me

This performance is an homage, a reference to “Anthropometries”, performances that the French artist Yves Klein conducted around 1958. To the music of his “Monotone Symphony of Silence,” naked girls were dipped in blue paint and, under the artist’s guidance, left imprints of their bodies on canvases. Klein himself called them “living brushes.”

There is no doubt that Klein's artistic practices are misogynistic and unacceptable in our time. Maria proposes to reconsider the practice from the point of view of gender equality, and, therefore, chooses a masculine-centric object for her performance – a condom. Maria explores themes of loss, feminism, identity, and in this performance she, like Klein, also uses a special blue colour that she created, only she has called it International Misogynistic Blue. During the performance, excerpts from Maria's book were read; real stories of women about separations and divorces. The artist poured the liquid, International Misogynistic Blue, into condoms and hung them like laundry on a clothesline.