Liste Art Fair Basel, Switzerland.
16-22 June 2025
With a background in observation-based drawing and storytelling, Mary Pakinee’s previous works have focused on the intimacies and nuances of human relationships. Her solo exhibitions, such as No Man Land (2023) and Garden in The Desert (2022), have explored themes of isolation, memory, and the body and its environment. These explorations into the intersection of personal history and collective experience provide a foundation for her current presentation, So Obsessed with Possessing, where Pakinee extends her investigation into how bodies are represented and classified.
In So Obsessed with Possessing the artist investigates the persistent tension between subject-hood and objectification, questioning the frameworks that position women’s bodies as a locus for governance. Policies concerned with maternity and reproductive health, for instance, may outwardly affirm women’s roles as citizens, but often they also simultaneously reduce women to their biological and reproductive functions.
Pakinee draws parallels between such policies with systems of classification that are rooted in colonialism—for instance, 16th century “cabinets of curiosities” or 18th century botanical gardens. These are mechanisms through which living entities are classified, aestheticised and contained. Through exploring this parallel, her work reveals ways in which women’s bodies are similarly objectified through observation and categorisation, as well as subjected to obsessive practices as attempts to possess and control.
A central element of So Obsessed with Possessing is its critical engagement with the gendered history of painting. Floral still-life paintings are historically associated with femininity, and often dismissed as merely domestic and decorative. Pakinee reclaims, recontextualises, and subverts this notion by painting beautiful and delicate subjects and producing alluring yet unsettling arrangements. The visual language of the work is a hybrid of anatomy and botany.
Narratives of myth and history further inform Pakinee’s conceptual framework. The figure of Medusa serves as a paradigm of patriarchal violence and its cultural repercussions: her transformation from victim to monster illustrates the phenomenon of victim-blaming, in both the mythological world as well as our very reality where women are silenced and shamed. Similarly, the figure of Cleopatra is remembered, here, not as the often-romanticised icon but as a historically important leader whose legacy has been reduced to scandal and seduction. These references underscore the ways in which powerful women are repeatedly recast through the lens of male desire, fear and control.
Embedded into the frames of the paintings are miniature sculptures, for instance, in Muscle Man! Don’t Look at Me, I’m Scared (Really)! (2025). The fly figurines function as a critical counterpart to these images, drawing on the historical symbolism of insects in vanitas paintings to evoke mortality, moral decay, and the grotesque. Its exaggerated musculature and diminutive scale serves a satirical commentary on masculinity, vulnerability, and the anxieties that underpin power. Much like how the symbolic fly in Dutch still-life paintings represents the absurdity of control.
Through Pakinee’s use of botanical and anatomical forms, painterly traditions, colonial references, and mythological narratives, the work invites viewers to consider the complex relationships between power and perception. So Obsessed with Possessing offers a critique of the systems that seek to possess, govern, and define women’s bodies.