Prokopenko Alina

This object imitates a woman’s handbag, filled with documents and personal belongings. Instead of leather, it is made of dough and cream; the documents are crafted from sugar paper, and the cigarettes from meringue. Over the course of the exhibition, the cake undergoes transformation: the materials gradually decay, mold appears, shapes collapse, and the bag becomes a vanitas-object.

The bag takes the form of a travel bag, echoing the confectionery notion of a “travel cake” — a format of pastry designed for transport and long preservation. At the same time, “What is in my bag?” refers to a popular social media format that presents the “ideal” contents of a woman’s handbag, a symbol of curated perfection. In my work, the handbag — or, more precisely, the emigrant woman’s handbag — is practical and personified. It is both private and public. Documents, passports, “temporary protection papers” — fragile, soaked, unstable — serve as a reminder of the precariousness of identity and the unsettled state of constant displacement. “All that is mine I carry with me.”

The handbag also acts as a marker of “femininity,” fashion, and the social pressure to “carry oneself” in a proper, commercialized form. Its contents, and their inevitable decomposition, reject this imposed ideal. During the exhibition, the artist herself will already have left the city — returned to Paris — while the cake will remain, rotting under the dome. This is a gesture of absence, of the impossibility of being in two places at once, of sharing energy in the form of food once meant for consumption.

The bright red color of the seductive pastry underscores the metaphor of female sexuality, while its gradual decay creates an ambivalence between pleasure and disgust.