image courtesy AUDREY WOLLEN

–

AUDREY WOLLEN is a Los Angeles-based artist who has developed a body of work through instagram entitled the Sad Girl Theory.  She explained to BENJAMIN BARRON for i-D that the ‘Sad Girl Theory proposes that the internalised suffering women experience should be categorised as an act of protest. We have historicised gestures of externalisation and violence, because they already fit into our standards of masculinity, and therefore, power. But there is an entire lineage of women who consciously disrupted the status quo through enacting their own sorrow. I think that a sad girl’s self destruction, no matter how silent or commonplace, is a strategy for subverting those systems, for making the implicit violence visceral and visible, for implicating us all in her devastation. ‘

Make sure to read the entire interview here or to follow her work on instagram.

–