This artwork was awarded a ‘student project of the month’ during my second year of study. The topic was “gender codes” and we were supposed to research it, form an opinion and “encode” it visually.
As I was thinking about it more and more, I became aware of the fact that every one of us is living in conformity to gender codes, which we inherited from our parents, our surroundings, our community and the media. Some gender roles we even create and propagate ourselves, but most of them we simply reinforce.
I wondered how people would react if I would shake some of these gender codes, if I were to flip the roles and observe reactions; men who would knit their brows and women who would spread their eyes and slightly drop their jaw while looking at these pictures.
