Adam Was Queer
2024, 120 х 180 cm, mixed media
With her latest painting, Iskra Blagoeva continues a well-established trend in her work – the artistic and critically motivated reconsideration of myths, symbols and narratives fundamental to human culture and related to the concepts of gender identity and self-perception, the power of representations and resulting stereotypes, as well as the personal act of revolt as a creative stimulus for emancipation.
The artwork is propelled as an experimental reading of the biblical cosmogonic myth about the creation of the world. The first human being, Adam, is transformed into a strange, ambiguous, androgynous creature – with his stolid, passionless, gentle and beautiful face, as if hooded by the impenetrable nimbus of his long black hair, and his whole figure resembling a finely and delicately painted porcelain piece, he emerges as an enigmatic image in which the masculine and the feminine alike challenge the mythological seal of identity. God creates Adam in his own image and likeness, but his creation is presented as initially split in the neutral and empty space of non-coincidence – an iconoclastic as well as a philosophically relevant gesture of revolt against the idea of divine predestination, according to which the pure and perfectly preordained act (actus purus) of God the Creator is absolutely identical to his essence. Introducing difference into the prototype before the appearance of any real distinction, before the appearance of Eve as the other of Adam, is a paradox to the very constitutive gesture of the Creator and a rupture in the foundational myth of creation. This new phantasmal image of the biblical proto-man introduces fluidity between his potential forms, which starkly contradicts the distinctive dissociation from the will of his creator – it expresses the possible rejection of self-definition, that is, of reducing the variety of possibilities to only one clearly delineated role which would inevitably embody the lack of choice and the super-actual power of the prototype. With the imaginary opening of this gap where the supreme archetype dissolves into uncertainty and irreducible difference, Adam is presented in his heterogeneous mode as a queer being: having attained the apple of knowledge before the appearance of Eve, he is the bearer of a different truth – that of non-definition, of the unspecified role, of transidentity, illustrated by a singular and fascinating image of hesitation and melancholic grandeur that both anticipates and exceeds the narrative about the origin of the human race.
With her present artwork, Iskra Blagoeva ironically suggests that the universality of gender identity or any other form of identity determination is not something primordial and does not consist in some natural or transhistorical circumstance – it must be worked out through the knowledge of the multiplicity of the human being, through the difference which initially scatters us among contradictory impulses, states and choices, in other words, through the experience of nonidentity. The image of Adam, who is not image and likeness of his creator, is the image of an alternative – of disobedience and resistance to a predetermined functional order, modelling the world according to some rigid mythological axiom that points to us and declares “you are who you are”.
Philip Stoilov