GLOBAL – NEW YORK, NY, USA – OCTOBER 28, 2010 – Artist Yishay Garbasz explores one of society’s most taboo subjects in Becoming: A Gender Flip Book. Showing the artist’s photograph of herself from one year before her gender reassignment surgery until one year afterward, the photos chronicling the external bodily changes throughout this period. As a flipbook, readers can view 89 of the 900 pictures Garbasz took of herself from male to female, or the reverse.
Film and cultural critic Vivian Sobchack writes in her accompanying essay: "Flip books and the celluloid cinema they became usually ‘suture’ and gloss over the cuts in time (and between individual frames) upon which their kinetic visual effects depend. These are real cuts made both in time and on the body-most particularly, on this body that now moves before us in its painless transition from then to now and from he to she."
In her personal essay about the project, Garbasz writes: "Becoming is a straightforward look at male-to-female sexual transition. I offer a direct look at the reality of my body during this process, in contrast to idealized male and female bodies and identities. So much of the media we see every day presents airbrushed, idealized stories and focuses on making products seem appealing. I want you to come to your own understanding about gender. My job is simply to put the information in your hands, literally. What you make of it is up to you."
Garbasz is a Berlin-based British-Israeli artist whose work delves deeply into social and political issues of identity, agency, human rights, and the construction of gender. She has exhibited widely in solo shows in galleries, museums, and photography festivals around the world. Becoming was installed as a zoetrope with 28 images in the 2010 Busan Biennale in Korea.
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