Abscission (Vaginale VI)

Young artist and performer Kurdwin Ayub presents her protagonist in a playful, dreamy setting: a bed with flowered sheets, two roses in a glass bottle, guitar leaning on the wall—on the bed, a girl in a flowered dress sits sewing.
Thick, black eyeliner seams her dark eyes and red lipstick emphasizes her sensual mouth. Looking innocently into the camera, she explains that she has to sew her black lace panties tighter so that they will fit onto her thin body. She loves sexy lingerie, and wants to surprise her boyfriend today with these black panties. While sewing, she has time to think and stories come to mind: she remembers an encounter with him two years earlier on the set of his former girlfriend’s film shoot, and how he acted towards her. 
In close-ups she shows precisely the individual technical steps necessary for bringing the panties into the appropriate form, while her attention keeps switching over to stories about her boyfriend. The story she tells of her love is a sad one.

Abscission is part VI in a series of short films by Kurdwin Ayub entitled Vaginale. In Abscission she turns to her favorite theme, relationships between men and women, between boys and girls. Here, as she has already done in earlier works, she places disturbing accents in her play with gender clichés, and refreshingly breaks from her seemingly naïve settings with their many female role assignments. (Christa Auderlitzky)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt