Dina Rončević

Defloracija (Defloration)
2008
An installation (a bed covered with sheets, a night table, a lamp, a book about car mechanics)

In her installation, Dina Rončević has investigated the conventional understanding of the opposition between male and female, as well as the issue of innateness vs. cultural acquisition of these conventions. The term ‘defloration’, which is the title of her work, denotes the piercing of female hymen. Language is what creates a cultural system, determining and prescribing social values. Within a word such as ‘defloration’, it is possible to discover an entire set of patriarchal concepts, which include understanding the masculine as active, right, public, and cultural, while the feminine is understood as passive, intimate, and natural (if we take “nature” as something animalistic and disorderly). Woman has no will of her own, she is a mere thing, an object of man’s passion; her hymen is pierced by a phallus, which thus acquires the role of the subject, the agent.

With the title Defloration, Dina Rončević quite clearly alludes to losing virginity. The allusion to mechanics is somewhat more subtle, with the linguistic explication of sexual intercourse within the “discourse” of mechanics. In her own words, Mechanics represents the principles of sexual intercourse; with the activation of driving power that can result in faster, slower, or especially powerful movement, there will be warming up and lubrication at about the same time, followed by penetration, and there is even a mechanical valve – the condom that prevents the passage of liquids. Thus, man regains his position of subject, since sex is described with the “jargon” of mechanics, characteristic of him, given the fact that he is the one who has invented the mechanics and practices it. Woman is returned to “male” space. In a symbolic act of crossing the borders between male and female, Dina Rončević decided to become a trained car mechanic for her final project at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb (although the Croatian system and language will only give her a masculine title), thus invading the “male” territory and presenting her experience in Defloration. By combining the masculine, contained in the factual expertise in mechanics, and the feminine, indicated by the bed (an obvious symbol of passivity), the installation actually recreates the act of sexual intercourse of the artist with herself: In this installation, knowledge means mechanics, and that knowledge is something that I am only beginning to discover and to use it in order to complete my identity, thus becoming a woman, as one usually says about a girl that is no longer virgin. However, the artist has also investigated the theme of construing the female identity and its discrimination by asking questions such as: Are there jobs that only men can perform and that are closed for women? Can a woman still choose a “male” profession? Does she lose a part of her femininity if she becomes a car mechanic? Is there some knowledge that is typically “male”, i.e. are there two different ways of thinking, male and female?

(J.P.)

Dina Rončević (b. 1984 in Zagreb) graduated from the School of Applied Arts and Design in Zagreb. In 2003, she continued her education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Department of Animation and New Media. She has presented her work at a number of group exhibitions.