2012 | Digital Prints
The folktale made room for matriarchal traditions, but these disappeared completely with the rise of fairytales, for the inherently patriarchal fairytale tradition confines women to a narrow range of possibilities, even when they are themselves the fairytale heroines. The modern Disney version incarnation of fairytales further limited female characters, reducing them to two polar archetypes: the young pretty heroine, virginal and sweet, who falls prey to dark schemes and has to be rescued, and the witch, a phallic and castrating mother set on avenging youth. Both archetypes are in fact two sides of the same character: Snow White and Cinderella are fated to grow into bitter old women that take out anger on their daughters.
Link picks images from the web and reuses them within the framework of fairytale in order to construct her own fairytale. Her series of witches presents a new female prototype that turns the rules of patriarchy against themselves. Each of the characters is constructed from a huge image bank of different cultural, religious, and national fragments, in a call for the birth of a new female image.
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