Shaken Not Stirred

At the center of Marge Monko’s video and photo works lies an examination of social developments in a post-socialist context. The artist traces the changes in gender-based role models that were inserted into Estonian culture by neoliberalism after the end of the Soviet era. In her works Monko portrays a society undergoing change and refers to the connections between the communist past and present day identity models. Frigidity in interpersonal relationships as a consequence of capitalist competitiveness runs through the video “Shaken not Stirred” and forms its leitmotif. It tells the story of three protagonists in their post-socialist reality: a business woman, a barkeeper and a cleaning woman. In their monologues and dialogues they reveal the deep rifts and contradictions in the polished surface of neoliberal society. While the business woman embodies professional success but private failure, the barkeeper represents the macho and opportunistic beneficiaries of the free market. In contrast, the Russian cleaning woman allows her raw emotionality to express, audibly and forcefully, the divide between her and the established elite. Here Marge Monko makes use of the apparently coincidental encounters of individual strangers to hold up a small-scale mirror image of society.