La palabra es cosa de vida o muerte

A contemporary representative of conceptual art in Latin America, Costa Rican artist Priscilla Monge has been part of the international art scene for more than three decades. Irreverent and incisive, her work makes a direct assault on the male gaze through the subversion of, and intervention in, spaces and objects of the everyday to interrupt and question the social construction of gender. In her series of photographs of Victorian-style tea sets, the fragile and delicately painted porcelain cups contain a dense liquid that resembles blood. On their surface are sentences that allude to a state of liminality, where words and love are at the brink of life and death. Monge has radically altered the image of a tea party from one of innocence and neatness into one of excess and impurity. The Word is a Matter of Life or Death critically re-examines the social expectations imposed on the female gender by staging an image where femininity appears as a conflicting set of meanings and associations. The use of homonyms, words that have similar sounds but different meaning, is used as a conceptual strategy to convey the invisible structures and forms of violence that shape social and cultural norms. In this series, the proximity between the words "vajilla" (tableware) and vagina, reveal the feminist critique tacitly present in the work’s provocative game of substitutions.