KELLI GEDVIL Not Like the Other Girls

Kelli Gedvil (b. 1994) is an artist, who lives and works in Tallinn. She has graduated from Estonian Academy of Arts painting department BA and contemporary art department MA. She has been on exchange studies in Hungarian University of Fine Arts and Valand Academy in Sweden. She has participated in several exhibitions in Estonia as well in Sweden, Belgium, Canada, Hungary, and Poland. Gedvil is a co-founder of an artist grouping called Robin Ellis Meta, a gallerist and technical support at online gallery Post-Gallery .online and co-founder of MTÜ Eesti-Saksa Kunstikoostöö. She usually works in installation and video medium, while emphasizing the interactiveness of her artworks to introduce and engage the topics with the viewer. Gedvil studies how behavioral patterns of self-presentation develop in virtual and real environments.
The exhibition deals with the transfer of body properties from reality to the virtual world. The exhibition title refers to a person who wants to stand out and put themselves on a different level than the others on social media. Using various tools, she creates an improved version of herself, but meanwhile loses her human qualities through this process – the pores, scars, pimples disappear from the skin, and hair resembles a soft textureless mass. She has become an object, which only exists in the virtual world.
The phenomenon ‘not like the other girls’ comes from American 90s chick flick films. The usual scenario for romantic comedies was two female characters. One of them was portrayed according to the beauty standards of Western society and the other one as an intelligent nerd, and both tried to get the same young man’s attention. As a result, internalized misogyny has deepened for decades, with young people growing up with the idea that they should be different from the other women while putting them down. In this exhibition, this phenomenon is placed in the context of social media, where ‘the others’ are the bodies that exist in the real world.
Artist thanks: Ian-Simon Märjama, Kristen Rästas, Leegi Kiis, Marek Gedvil.