ALEKSANDRA CEGIELSKA

CONSUMED is a visually bold and conceptually layered body of work that interrogates the performance of femininity, the ritual of eating, and the politics of looking. Drawing from a lineage of radical feminist artists and performance histories, this series positions food not as subject matter alone, but as a metaphorical and material site through which cultural anxieties around gender, desire, and consumption are vividly enacted.

Inspired by the radical feminist art of the 1960s and ’70s, including the provocative performances of Natalia LL, Carolee Schneemann, and the subversive humor of Hannah Wilke, CONSUMED explores the complex relationship between women, food, and the politics of representation in contemporary visual culture. In today’s hyper-mediated world, food and femininity have become strangely entangled in the spectacle of image culture. Drawing from feminist performance traditions, CONSUMED interrogates how seemingly innocent acts - like eating - are imbued with layers of voyeurism, control, and social expectation.

The project unfolds across media: it began with a sequence of vivid food paintings - croissant, sausage, soup, ice cream - each rendered with a playful yet uncanny precision. These paintings recall both domestic still lifes and advertising iconography, revealing the thin line between appetite and seduction. But these were never meant to remain static. The artist reintroduces the same foods into photographic performance, placing herself - costumed, stylized, and sharply lit - into carefully staged tableaus where she consumes each item in full view of the camera.

These photographic portraits do more than echo the earlier paintings; they amplify their critique. The foods reappear as props in a choreographed spectacle of eating. Cegielska’s body is not merely a subject - it becomes part of the mise-en-scène. Her lipstick, manicured nails, and vintage costumes are meticulously color-matched to the food or backdrop, fusing body and object, consumption and performance. What emerges is a tight visual language in which the boundaries between subject and commodity begin to dissolve.

To further destabilize the gaze, the artist also captures these scenes with a vintage video camera. The resulting looped video works carry a grainy, analog quality that feels simultaneously nostalgic and unnerving. They slow down time and fracture the glossy perfection of the photographic stills, inserting another layer of observation: the act of filming the act of eating. In this recursive lens, the viewer witnesses not only performance but its documentation—the process of being consumed by the gaze.

The visual echo between painting and photograph heightens the tension between innocence and implication, hunger and desire, consumption and objectification. By aligning her body with edible objects and choreographing every gesture of ingestion, Cegielska invokes a lineage of feminist critique while reclaiming the terms of the exchange. Referencing the performative absurdity of Natalia LL’s Consumer Art and the embodied provocation of Schneemann’s radical gestures, she reclaims the gaze by inserting herself directly into these constructed images.

Here, eating is not just a physical act; it is a site of social inscription. What does it mean for a woman to eat on camera? To lick jam from a finger or slice a croissant with theatrical precision? These gestures, at once absurd and deeply intimate, expose how appetite - particularly female appetite - has been disciplined, eroticized, and pathologized. Cegielska turns these moments into tableaux of resistance. She performs desire not as spectacle for others, but as self-authored expression. She eats not to be watched, but to reclaim what watching has denied.

CONSUMED confronts a broader visual culture in which women’s bodies - and by extension, their appetites - are relentlessly mediated. The work asks: When did a donut become erotic?When did eating in public become a spectacle?When did women’s bodies - clothed, unassuming, or mundane - become sites of cultural control?

By staging these questions through irony and seduction, Cegielska disarms and implicates. Her works are not didactic - they are affective. They create unease precisely by being so visually appealing. The viewer is drawn in, only to confront their own assumptions. Is this glamorous? Is this grotesque? Is this funny - or is it a slow dismantling of centuries-old aesthetic and patriarchal regimes?

This tension is precisely the power of CONSUMED. It embraces contradiction: pleasure and discomfort, attraction and critique, spectacle and sincerity. The series becomes a mirror to contemporary image culture, where every act is both performative and policed, where consumption - literal and visual - has become a dominant mode of engagement, especially for women.

And yet, there is a deeply personal thread woven through the work. Cegielska is not impersonating or abstracting - she is present. Her body is not symbolic; it is her own. Her gestures are rooted in lived experience, in the inherited codes of femininity, and in the absurdity of performing oneself for a world trained to consume rather than see.

In this way, CONSUMED becomes not just a critique of how women are seen, but a reclamation of how they might wish to be seen: with hunger, with agency, with contradiction intact.