Design
Insa Deist+
Insa Deist (*1991 in Berlin) is an Amsterdam based graphic designer working in the cultural field, in her design practice she collaborates with Hjördis Lyn Behncken. Next to that she has a strong interest in design research and aesthetic theory, hailing from her (and surroundings) own enmeshments and complicity in said structures.
To observe and be observed, this work offers two options shaped by the knowledge of aesthetics, codes thereof and their discursive emancipatory potential. Informed by vlogs, subliminals and sculpturing of the self (not only) online, a discussion–bargaining, brookering–about commodification of beauty, femininity, feminisms and gendered historiography unfolds in the landscape in a mixture of camp and strategy. How do we interact with aesthetic gendered categories that instrumentalize femmes/women? The work is about image making and fantasies, the female erotic, girlies, bimbos, ownership over these images, who owns the means of production and distribution for images that activate desire, it’s about male fantasies to the inevitable extent.
considering the acceleration of the trend cycle and how it dramatizes the evolving relationship between present and past. Benjamin said look at where those overlap so that cracks open up and there through a montage, through the acceptance of the fragments, there might be a glimpse of splintered utopias.
We repeatedly visit the word feminism, what even does it mean if so many shelled and hollowed it out, if the project is so torpedoed at times.