The Unhappy Vagina
30/10/2020
With the support of Womxn Making Art in Public Space
Alexanderplatz
Berlin, Germany
The Unhappy Vagina is a public intervention by Maiada Aboud, revisited in 2020 at Alexanderplatz, Berlin, during the Corona period and supported by Womxn Making Art in Public Space. Taking place in one of Berlin’s most visible public squares, the work brought the intimate, silenced and gendered body into the open space of the city.
In this intervention, women were invited to ring a bell in public as a collective demonstration against masculinity, domination and patriarchal control. The sound of the bell became both an interruption and an announcement: a refusal to remain quiet, hidden or obedient. Its ringing occupied the public sphere with a bodily, political and symbolic force.
Aboud first performed this work during her art studies at Haifa University, at a time marked by her divorce and by her position as a Catholic Palestinian woman negotiating social, religious and gendered expectations. Returning to the piece in Berlin during the pandemic gave it a new urgency. In a period of restriction, isolation and public fear, the act of ringing the bell became a renewed gesture of presence, resistance and embodied power.
The work attempts to reclaim power through the simple but forceful fact that the bell rings. As a phallic symbol, the bell turns the sign of male authority back onto itself. Its sound reminds men, and the structures they dominate, that women also possess power, voice and agency. The Unhappy Vagina transforms vulnerability into public action, and silence into resonance
