Girlbeast

Ines Borovac received a grant for the development of new work. Girlbeast is a video work exploring the power of girls’ animality, instinct, and desire within a predatory economy. By juxtaposing a group of girls in an urban environment with a flock of lambs, the project shifts the position of the young girl from a symbol of consumption at the end of the patriarchal “food chain” toward an animal capable of creating its own world, senses, and relations. As Anne Boyer writes in When the Lambs Rise Up Against the Bird of Prey: “The lamb that found itself too much among the wolves found the remedy was to become even more animals.” The video investigates what becomes possible when the “girl” stops functioning as an image for consumption and returns to instinct: to nonverbal, human–lamb gestures and embodied forms of communication, protection, and care. Through flock-like behaviour, the girls create new forms of collective sensing, attunement, and play, discovering realities unattainable to the predatory world.

Ines is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in Amsterdam. Her practice spans from performance, multimedia installation, moving image, to performative objects. She is driven to understand how harmful power dynamics are encoded onto marginalised bodies and how oppressive traditional systems morph and reassert themselves within contemporary digital structures of control. At the heart of Borovac’s practice lays the body as a site of resistance: a vessel held between the visibly violent gestures of tradition and the imperceptible violence of the digital. Shifting between absurdism, vulnerability, spectacle, and roughness, her practice operates from the conviction that digital systems of control are reconfigurations of existing traditional forms, and that tracing the symptoms of power coded onto bodies is the key to unlocking this connection. By displacing power structures into absurdist scenarios, she seeks to demystify their complexity and rebalance power dynamics.