Esmaa Mohamoud Canadian, b. 1992
154.9 x 104.1 x 5.1 cm
The series manifests variously as wearable gown sculptures that are either worn by models or displayed in a gallery, photographs of those models wearing the gowns, and installations that sometimes include the photographs, the gowns, models wearing some of the gowns, and various other two and three-dimensional elements.
Mohamoud is commenting on several aspects of how bodies, and in particular Black bodies, are represented within the world of sports, including: how vulnerability and fragility are discouraged; how women’s bodies are marginalized or hyper-sexualized; and how athletes are locked into an insidiously objectified and glamorized structure of what Mohamoud describes as “neo-slavery.”