Role Exchange

Role Exchange was a performance done in 1975. Marina had been an artist for 10 years. She went to Amsterdam and found a prostitute who had been working for 10 years. Marina proposed that they witch roles for a night. She had a gallery opening at De Appel gallery in Amsterdam that she asked the prostitute, Suze, to attend. While Suze was at the gallery opening Marina would sit in her window in the Red Light District. While Suze was at the gallery she stated, “I don’t know nothing about art, but I know everything about fucking.” She simply didn’t know how to act in the gallery setting, she seemed very out of her element. Marina also seemed out of her element in the window. She had three clients come to see Suze, and they all realized that Marina was not her. From what I can gather about this piece she did not have to sleep with any of them. Suze commented that Marina would not make a very good prostitute.

This piece was a response to Marina’s upbringing in Yugoslavia. She was taught there that a prostitute is a nobody, the lowest that a woman can go. If you wanted to be somebody then you get educated. That is exactly what Marina did, she became somebody. She decided that she wanted to be in the place of what she was taught was nobody. She wanted to explore what it meant if she was there simply to be used. She writes, “The idea was really the aggression to your mental state of being of different situations, to try in the performance to see the all the different possibilities using the body.”

This piece slightly reminds me of Vallie Export’s piece in which she walked around asking people to grab her breasts through the box. She did this as an expression of freedom of being a woman, as well as to show that view of women during that time period.