She Keeps Them Warm
With Her Skirt,
(2025)
Curator
Co-curated with Madelon van Schie
Date & Location:
09.05–26.07.2025
Rozenstraat, Amsterdam
Participating artists:
AnnaMaria Pinaka
In She Keeps Them Warm With Her Skirt, AnnaMaria Pinaka explores seemingly contradictory iconic representations of femininity. Her newest work departs from role models from her youth, yet these figures might no longer be recognizable in their original form. Pinaka’s mutable subjects surface through a variety of mediums. They transcend the conventional, consciously seeking their existence in the realm of fiction, free from the constraints of social codes and expectations. In many ways, they embody the spirit of childhood, where everything still lies open in potential, and boundaries of identity are fluid and unformed by social norms.
Both the exhibition and the related performance, taking place at Het Salon, start from the ‘princess’ as a complex feminine icon and a product of a white, imperialist Europe that has come down and profoundly influenced the southern Balkans. In the context of the newly formed, post-Ottoman Greece of the early 19th century, royalty arrived for the first time with the Bavarian adolescent king Otto and Amalie von Oldenburg, known in Greek as Amalia. Although not explicitly addressed in this exhibition, Pinaka views this historical event and its broader context, as the inauguration of whitewashing and homogenisation of the numerous ethnic groups and populations that coexisted throughout Greece and the region at that time. In a country that lacked a ‘national identity’ approved by Europe, Amalia became a symbol of the representation of the Western woman, an icon that every feminine and formerly peripheral or ‘uncivilised’ body should aspire to become.
Expanding further into the performative, the princesses literally take the stage, playing as the punk band Baby’s Breath. The performing bodies become vessels through which layers of femininity are explored and reshuffled, holding space for girliness and queer femmness to take the front and to share their agonies and joys. These slippery princesses become key points of reference within She Keeps Them Warm With Her Skirt, but the exhibition ponders on a wider range of ambiguous potentialities.
At its heart, She Keeps Them Warm With Her Skirt makes space for a longing to escape the normative and the everyday. This yearning presents itself most evocatively in the form of a dirty otherworldliness, a dreamlike ‘grunge romance’, as proposed in the video Past Where The Sky Turns (2025) in which Pinaka explores further entanglements between the magical and the mundane. In addition, three earlier videos are presented, each steeped in intimacy and self-exposure. The work Modern Family (2016) shows the artist lying on a bed, appearing disengaged and lethargic. Pregnant, she whispers grand names for her unborn child. Her grandmother sings a song about the nature of ‘the mother’. Is this her destiny? Is she happy? Good at it (2014) juxtaposes a dry, scientific description of a girl’s puberty with everyday, sometimes ‘inappropriate’, desires and keywords, all rendered in an absurdist tone while Pinaka dances stoically in circles. Finally, Bycatch (2020) partially returns to the intimate, domestic setting of the artist. It consciously explores taboos and ‘the unheard’ but with a lighter, more playful tone. Again, different inner worlds seem to overlap and blur into one another. Combining layers of intuition, She Keeps Them Warm With Her Skirt invites us to inhabit the space where childhood, femmeness and belonging intersect, stirring the waters of normativity.
Mondrian Fonds, Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst