Fräulein Talents: ELENI SISMANIDOU on Reversing the Male Gaze and Pushing Beauty Ideals to Absurdity

Eleni Sismanidou: I’m interested in who gets to produce an image and who is expected to inhabit it. For centuries, women’s bodies have been central to art while women’s authority as image makers has been restricted. That imbalance still shapes how female creativity is seen, particularly when images circulate online. I work with cultural influences and feminine codes and push them to the point where the gaze behind them becomes visible. I enjoy taking things to absurd extremes to create a moment of irony. To do this, I use performance, painting and AI; I want to shape the images through which we understand bodies, desire and artistic authorship. In my work, I therefore question the current zeitgeist, expose such structures and attempt to counter them with different images and narratives. For me, this is a form of avant-garde, and this is what I want to contribute to.

I love working with silicone, it’s such a contemporary material. It also embodies ideals of beauty.

I enjoy the dialogue that comes from casting silicone into images or images that are made of silicone and then working with them. By using the material, I’m automatically making a statement. I also enjoy working with materials like bronze or stone; with these, you have the discourse of old tradition and newer feminine codes all in one.

Greek mythology is very close to my heart and plays a big role because I grew up with all these legends and myths. I actually only used this Medusa symbolism because I was working with stone at the time and carving various manifestos into stone, and I thought it was fitting to portray myself as Medusa. Generally speaking, I like to stage myself, including as a hybrid identity, like as a centaur or something like that. It’s a creature caught between reason and instinct. You always have this inner drive, sometimes you hold yourself back, sometimes you push yourself on. I find mythological creatures fascinating.

Athens is really fascinating with its ancient, archaic structure, the sculptures and the decay of it. That ancient world, which was organized in such a completely different way. I think Christianity brought a shift in how bodies, particularly female bodies, were depicted and idealized. I feel like before that, they were viewed differently, within a different cultural and religious context. 

I also find the contemporary culture in Athens fascinating, everything exists in parallel. The tension between two worlds that coexist but can’t be reconciled. Like people living through crises and utter desperation, while tourists are having their ‘Athens moment’, wearing golden wreaths from souvenir shops and strolling through the same streets. It’s always fun to go to Greece, to my parents’ villages or to the seaside. A friend of my father has a large marble studio where I’m allowed to work and experiment with stone. That’s very special, of course, and gives me very direct access to the material. 

Stuttgart offers structure, efficiency and a different kind of inspiration for me.

I’m only 29 and the students are perhaps two years younger, so I feel very close to them. We often share the same interests and teaching can feel like researching alongside my peers. I set the thematic direction and bring my own artistic perspective, while leaving room for them to challenge ideas and shape the conversation. That exchange is what I value most about teaching. I take their perspectives seriously and expect them to take their own positions seriously, too. And that’s actually really beautiful. There’s no need for hierarchy anyway, especially when it comes to teaching.

I come from a Greek working-class family in Germany, where a secure profession mattered the most. It’s the typical migrant dream of a better life for the next generation, art was never really a thing. I initially planned to become a teacher of art and German, not an artist, but that meant studying art. I went to a portfolio class and when the lecturer told me my portfolio had no chance, I discarded almost everything, rebuilt it in three days and got into art school. I come from a background where people tend to laugh at the idea of someone painting something, hanging it up and expecting it to represent some kind of social discourse. That’s why in the beginning, I found it extremely difficult to take it seriously, like talking about circles for two hours.

However, that distance allowed me to question what the academy took for granted. Over the past two years, I’ve developed my own visual language and consciously chosen this path. My parents still ask me what I actually do. It’s a fair question, and one I want my work to answer on its own terms.

I think my own visual language developed when I started working with negative moulds of Baroque frames and canvases. This led me to this principle: no matter what I put into these forms and throw into them, it becomes an image. In this way, I can outwit painting, work conceptually and visualize my thoughts very quickly. It was important for me to develop a direct process that can also work as a series. From that point on, I began to see this way of working as my own visual language.

Materiality is actually one of the most important media in the digital age. As I said earlier, silicone can already communicate something, reveal something and open up a dialogue, simply through its materiality. The same is true for bronze or other tactile materials, such as hair, eyelashes and nails. These are codes that are mainly associated with women. Materiality is the starting point for this, it allows you to initiate a discourse.

It’s so intuitive, and somehow it ended up as a sort of abstract image. It’s more of a game, and of course, hair is charged with meaning; it’s a symbol – political, religious, open to interpretation in all areas – but first and foremost, it’s my hair, my medium, my form of communication. It’s fun and fun is my constant practice.

Not always. When you see large chunks of hair, they’re not mine. That’s when I’ve added synthetic hair. But I did collect my own hair at the beginning. In theory, you can collect anything from yourself. You can also sell anything from yourself.

I find it interesting to observe what’s currently regarded as the ideal of beauty, and to start by stating it. It’s considered beautiful to have full breasts or lips, smooth, youthful skin and no wrinkles. But why? As soon as you start questioning it, you quickly end up at images. What images have we seen that lead us to think something is beautiful? Who produced them, who determines them, and whose gaze is directed at the body depicted?

The term is controversial, but it describes a power exerted by the gaze upon the body. It’s so deeply internalized that we believe we find something beautiful of our own accord, even though our own opinion might be entirely different. But beauty is not a neutral factor, it’s also the same with ugliness. Why we find something ugly is exactly the same as with beauty. I believe that we all fall prey to these images in one way or another. Myself included, of course.

I’m less interested in the question of what is beautiful than in who, historically, had the power to define what beauty is and how the images of femininity and beauty were produced. After all, the female gaze has been heavily marginalized in art history and for me, it’s therefore almost impossible to grasp historically. Most images of the body were produced and displayed by the perspective of men, thereby perpetuating certain power dynamics.

Right now I find it incredibly fascinating to ask, what the ‘female gaze’ might actually be: What is my female gaze on the male body, on art or on my own body?

Yes, the men rubbing sun cream on themselves. Soft-porn aesthetics. I’m interested in how this can be broadened. Images that use sex to sell, which are usually projected primarily onto women’s bodies. What does it actually mean to sexualize the male body from a female perspective?

Clearly, this classic reversal of that gaze isn’t the solution – it does create a moment of irony though. But as soon as we can identify a gaze as the male gaze, we can also examine and deconstruct it.

Female creativity is still frequently portrayed through a male gaze. As soon as a woman stages herself being creative or working in her studio – particularly on social media – this is often done from a voyeuristic perspective, simply because it generates so many clicks.

What are muses anyway? These stereotypical images naturally find their place on social media; it’s a complex intertwining of ideology, marketing and sexselling.

I’ve often filmed myself whilst working in the studio, and when posting, I quickly realized that the focus wasn’t so much on my painting, but rather on my body or my outfit – people commenting on what I’m wearing or how cute I am. That frustrated me because I actually wanted to show my artistic process, but the focus was always on my body. So I asked myself how I could take that reception to the point of absurdity and invited someone who consciously works with their body to exaggerate that experience. We then did a sort of live session where people commented or asked what we should paint. It even went as far as making an ass-print on the canvas. For a while, it was a trend for girls to make a print of their ass on a canvas. It was regarded as a great image, but ultimately, it primarily celebrates a fetishized form of female creativity, it’s not really about a genuine creative process.

It’s so ironic, because female creativity is rarely recognized as a creative force, yet on OnlyFans it says in huge letters, BECOME A CREATOR NOW. When creating means staging the body to appeal to a predominantly male audience, the female creator can end up feeding the male gaze. The platform promises creative power, but how much control do you actually have if your income depends on fulfilling those expectations? What is creativity in this context? There’s something very religious about that word “creator” too.

I also put on an OnlyFans exhibition with my students as part of the ABK Rundgang this year. We developed projects on the platform, but then OnlyFans banned us.

It can be a form of performance, but whether it becomes performance art depends on what you do with it. OnlyFans can give you income, independence and a degree of control over your image. At the same time, you’re monetizing access to your body within a system that shapes how it is seen. You can work critically within that system, but you’re still negotiating its expectations. In my own work, I’m interested in desexualizing the female body and placing the male body in the position of being looked at, to test how those existing power dynamics can be shifted and to expose the expectations behind them. 

If you simply have a female body and present yourself on social media, then it’s often primarily just about the body and not about what you do. For me, that’s precisely the tension. That’s also why I developed this particular performance piece.

Of course, I could claim to be neutral, but it’s not. Gazes do things and often determine the outcome. For example, Bruce Nauman was an important reference for me while studying. He did performances where he set up a camera in his studio and then walked back and forth. He filmed himself doing it, and people were like: ‘Wow, he’s walking around his studio – that’s art! Moving around the studio is art!’ But if I were to do that as a woman, people ‘What’s she wearing? Why’s she walking like that? Her ass is big, why does she have such small breasts?’ It’s viewed differently straight away. 

I think that ‘Slime Jesus’ thing was pretty intense. Milena Lorek created a performance in which I took part. I was this fetus covered in rice paper in the church, really slimy and gooey. That was absolutely hardcore, because I had to lie there motionless for three hours. I had small burns on my lower legs from that hot mat, and at the same time it was freezing cold because of the building. And what went on afterwards – how it was politicized by some far-right media – that was really intense. Making art really isn’t for the faint-hearted, it’s a challenge in itself.

You’re always learning, and I think that’s actually the most exciting part. I’m not the sort of person who sits alone in the studio. I need interaction and I need input from other people who are also working creatively.

For one thing, it’s my peers – for example, Elif Çelik, a painter who studied with me. Tschaggi, with whom I do loads of curatorial projects; we motivate each other and give each other the right impulses to keep going.

Charlie Stein also gives me important inspiration, I really like her approach. And then, of course, there are performance artists like Florentina Holzinger. She actively desexualizes the female body, which I find super, super exciting and really important.

Well, I’m writing lots of concepts at the moment, and there’s one I’d like to realize with an AI company in Stuttgart. I’d like to design a kind of AI that projects an ideology based on an alternative world order, to explore how regimes of gaze, cultural influences and affiliations are inscribed in everyday situations or in things like greeting cards, advertising or similar. I hope it’ll be realized soon, it’s my new baby.