Critical Focus:

Maya Gurantz

Critical Focus: Maya Gurantz presented The Whore’s Dialogue, a three-screen installation. It featured three mature female actors performing an intricate script constructed from diverse contemporary sources, including personal memoirs, court transcripts of violent sex crimes, prostitutes’ blogs, and pornographic jokes. The work was inspired by the ancient genre of erotic literature of the same name made famous in the eighteenth century by the French libertine philosopher, the Marquis de Sade. Traditionally, “the whore’s dialogue” took the form of a titillating conversation between a sexually experienced woman and a young protégé, often a daughter, covering issues not only of sex and seduction, but also politics, history, and human nature. Gurantz’s work, featuring the voices of a Mother, a Wife, a Daughter, and a disembodied Anima or female unconscious, blurs the lines we ordinarily try to maintain between pleasurable sexual encounters, pornographic fantasy, and violence. This installation appeared as part of the MCA Denver program series Feminism & Co: Art, Sex, Politics, which focuses on issues of women and gender through forms of creative practice.

Maya Gurantz was born in 1977 in Oakland, California. She lives and works in Los Angeles.