It’s Fatebe’s World and We’re Just Living in It

Originally published in King Kong Magazine issue 15.

Russian-born, New York-based artist Ebecho Muslimova knows that laughter is a universal balm for pain. Although she’s wary, if not outright adverse, of saying this should always be the case. Her paintings don’t take a position either way; she leaves that up to the viewer.

In a climate where everything seems to be either the punchline or the set up to a joke, it’s only natural that Muslimova’s drawings of her recurring star Fatebe, which started as a base joke over a decade ago, turned into something serious.

Fatebe, pronounced Fah-tee-bee, fearlessly undergoes countless trials and tribulations with a defiant air of blissful disregard. She seemingly has a limitless threshold for the uncomfortable; nothing can stand in her way. Muslimova’s recent solo exhibition FOG at Magenta Plains in New York presents Fatebe in eight scenes drawn out across large-scale oil paintings on aluminum.

In one frame, a cauldron tilts to the side as the cables supporting it tear from the weight of its contents; crouched below, Fatebe awaits the first splatter. Fluids falling onto her or out of her is nothing new. Elsewhere, she is turned inside out, laying horizontal across a cracked mirror, arms pushed up as she supports a giant labia tied to her back via cables, like human nigiri. Nearby, stuck inside a savory aspic jelly cake, she squats down to pee, indifferent to her predicament. Next, she appears in multiples: One Fatebe bursts open a stagecoach door to yell at another Fatebe holding the reins of yet another larger Fatebe attached to a bridle, reaching for carrots on the floor.

Fatebe is unbothered. Societal shame be damned.

She is also exposed. There are no shadows, as if she is caught in the frame of a flash photo. Her nude voluminous body is suspended in one dimensional space, yet distinctly grounded in the very tangible qualms of the present day. Excess, gluttony, over stimulation, e-waste, hyper-sexuality: you name it, Fatebe has conquered it.

Her large body spills out as she consumes, consumes, consumes; other times, fluids spill out of her body. If Muslimova’s work was photorealistic it could be considered the painting descendent of David Cronenberg’s body horror genre. Yet, her cartoon-like doodles offer up a more playful lens, palatable lens for her often disturbing subject matter a la the surreal illustrations of Hieronymus Bosch. Like Bosch, she creates a world that is ridiculous rather than frightening.

Following her successful show at Magenta Plains, Muslimova spoke to King Kong about the world of Fatebe, making and breaking rules, laughing in uncomfortable situations, moving from Russia to America and her early memories of art.

MB: I saw your show at Magenta Plains and I loved it. I’m glad I got to see it before talking to you because it makes such a difference seeing the works in person.

EM: Totally, I especially feel like that show more than others requires an in person viewing.

MB: Did you make all of the works specifically for the exhibition?

EM: Yeah, it was planned out according to the floor plan for that space. I’ve been tending to work more and more that way where it’s for a specific space. My studio isn’t big enough to see all the paintings at once, so I only saw them together a day or two before the opening. I was happy that the size of them worked with how many bodies were in the space at the opening. She held her own.

MB: In some of your past works, Fatebe is jumping out of the works and overflowing onto the walls; she expands into the gallery space. With this show, she’s very much trapped inside the dimension of the painting. At the same time, the dimensions of the works mirror the gallery walls because they are so big.

EM: One of the very loose frameworks that I had at the beginning of this show was that the aluminum panels were like scenes or openings into this other world, and the floor plan of the gallery was this viewing box spliced into this larger world. The cables that are rendered in the pieces, they’re cut to sections. Then the panels are factory cut, almost like building materials, so it makes sense that they would be like walls.

MB: Your images manage to take up space while remaining one-dimensional, considering your background in sculpture, do you think that Fatebe will enter the three-dimensional space over time?

EM: I haven’t done sculptures since school. Sculpture was almost too vulnerable; it could be touched; it declared space. It was seen from all sides. So the flat controlled world of Fatebe was a way to find another path where I could hide or not reveal anything else besides what the line indicates on the page.

Then over time these pieces began to exist in concrete, physical spaces, in man-made architectural spaces and so they became sculptural. Not sculptural in the sense of the painting as an object in the room, but sculptural in the relationship between what is being revealed and what is being concealed. The tension in between the physical space and the image’s imagined viewfinder starts to become sculptural — the physical box where Fatebe hangs or where she lays (and I guess to say that she lays there is a sculptural term). I am exploring ways, especially with the murals, of how the imagined depicted space can spill over into the room. Kind of like crumbs. Crumbs on the floor and crumbs in the piece. I’m at this point in my life and in my work where I’m trying to trust the process and see how it spills out.

MB: Over your career you have imposed rules such as only using flat lines or only using black and white and then broken them. Are there any parameters you currently work within? Are there any rules left to break?

EM: I set up these rules when I started to establish a recipe from which Fatebe could be made, to establish the ingredients in order for her to be distinct enough to withstand whatever molding is done to her. Now thinking back, I can see how working within those rules, I was also developing and finding my own parameters and boundaries, so it made sense that that’s what I would do in my practice. Now I’m at this point in life where the idea of making a rule and breaking it takes a different path that’s not necessarily forward, there could be a circling back around. I trust that the foundations are already there and that it can be flexible.

MB: Yeah and if you start from a place of no rules, it’s hard to even think of what boundaries to push.

EM: You have to live within the rules to know why you want to break them.

MB: A hundred percent. Could you walk me through who Fatebe is and how she has evolved?

EM: So it’s Fat Ebe. And my nickname is Ebe.

MB: I don’t know how I didn’t put that together.

EM: It’s okay. People think it’s like an ethnic spin of Fatima or something. No, it’s Fat Ebe. I started drawing her from a very raw and vulnerable time in my life. This wasn’t supposed to be an art project, it was supposed to be anti-art. I wanted to not be involved or do anything that would be mistaken as art. Making a really stupid joke and running with it to an impractical end gave me that freedom at that moment. Fatebe was a base joke on a fat version of myself. Now looking back, I was dealing with body image issues and it was a way to shrug out some anxiety; it still is.

Then she became her own character, but it seemed ridiculous to change her name. I want to make it clear that I’m not making fun of fat people, that’s just her body and that’s just her name. I didn’t think in the beginning that I was going to be doing this for this long. I mean I kind of did; I wanted to play a sick joke on myself and the world where I would just draw this character for the rest of my life and never participate in any art world things. Then the joke became real because it became genuinely interesting and dynamic.

Now she’s evolved to where she can split herself and be multiple selves in one piece. This might sound like a small point, but I distinctly remember it being uncomfortable and disturbing to do that in the beginning, probably because she was less of a stable self. For the past couple years, I have been working on shows, and I only see these pieces together after they’re installed. The idea that she can exist parallel to herself and interact with herself opens up possibilities of how to play with space and with the sculptural conversation.

MB: So seeing multiple versions of Fatebe together in separate paintings during your exhibitions pushed you to include multiple Fatebes in a single work?

EM: Right, it was already there, so it was a natural progression. I made her as a singular and then by nature of showing work in the space, the multiple was imposed on her. And that’s the thing with breaking rules that are imposed: How can she play with that? Her material and my material are the things that are imposed on me in my life, by my environment.

MB: Fatebe undergoes countless trials and tribulations that are imposed on her, but she manages to remain unfazed, almost shameless. How does societal shame come into play?

EM: Societal shame is one of the ingredients she is created from. That doesn’t mean that the work is for or against societal shame. I’m not advocating for anything. It’s just a condition of society, it’s an organizational tool, and it’s an order. It’s everywhere, so I might as well use it as a material.

MB: Totally. In one painting she is engorged in this gelatin cake, in another she is slouched over watching a screen surrounded by more screens. There’s this idea that overeating or being tied into technology would be shameful, but she appears blissfully unaware. It seems to reflect the shame back to the viewer instead.

EM: Well, the piece where she is sitting in the middle of a cornucopia of her own e-waste is not green propaganda. That’s just what is around; the shame of environmental transgressions. It’s about abundance and gluttony.

Images are important to me. When I’m starting the process, I sit for days and go through images that have rarely anything to do with the body. I’ll surf the web. I screenshot things. What rises up to the top of the soup is what is valid enough for me to mess around with.

MB: The more scenarios you put Fatebe in, a narrative starts to develop organically. Do you learn from her experiences ?

EM: I definitely learn. I don’t have an agenda. It doesn’t feel meaningful to me if I use her to say something, so I’m creating from whatever happens to be descending upon me. I learn a lot when I look back. I’m like, Oh I obviously was dealing with such and such at the time.

One of the rules that I had when I first started is that there would never be a repeat drawing and everything would be completely new. She was supposed to be modular; you could file each piece away under their own index. You need Fatebe swallowing a piano? Here you go. Another reason for the rule to never repeat was that I told myself, If you do it once, do it perfectly, no need to repeat it. Now that’s changing because Fatebe has had so many experiences under her belt that it’s interesting to circle back on things and see how they change.

MB: To see if she responds differently?

EM: Right and essentially if I respond differently.

MB: With our endless access to information online, oversharing has become the norm. But while you start from a personal place, you present your ideas within the framework of Fatebe’s world. Does filtering your thoughts through Fatebe give you distance from them?

It’s not a one-to-one. Fatebe is a ridicule on the idea of confession. She’s a clown, a jester. The jester makes jokes about the taboos of their time in order for people to process them. That’s what I’m doing with Fatebe. In the age of over sharing, my work intuitively took this form.

She’s like a manipulation tool as any clown is. There’s also a joke in how she has no shadow. She’s always caught in a camera flash. She’s exposed, but there is a lot of strategy, concealment, and manipulation that I do to make her appear revealed.

MB: Yeah, I think that’s such an interesting point. Her apparent exposure contains layers of concealment.

EM: Originally when I started there was a rule where everything would be done in one frame; the beginning, the middle, and the end would be in one moment; there would be no shadow on her or anywhere. There would be no shadow because shadow implies depth and that something is concealed. I thought that was too vague. I had this urge to just put it out flat in one go.

MB: It’s almost like it’s hidden in plain sight. Also, your playful style makes it more entertaining and easier to digest some of the darker intense situations that Fatebe is in. If you were to draw something super realistic of someone naked being used as a horse on a carriage, it could be really disturbing.

EM: No, totally. Sometimes in the beginning people would send me grotesque things and I would be like, Ew I don’t want to see that, I only want to see my own drawings. Humor also masks things. It reveals, and masks, and it’s humbling.

MB: Yeah, definitely.

EM: It would be really terrible for me to imagine doing this without humor, as it would be terrible to imagine going through this life without humor. It’s a leveling quality; everyone laughs, everyone poops, everyone pays taxes. Humor makes a situation more flexible and better able to withstand the rigid and harsh world.

MB: I agree. Humor is such a big part of the way we communicate right now. It’s to the point where everything seems like a joke, even things that are not funny. My partner makes jokes about things that he is uncomfortable with and at first it upset me because he’ll joke about intimacy or the future.

EM: And you’re like, Why is that funny? That’s life, right?

MB: Yeah, but now I get it. Naming his fears and laughing about them is how he processes them.

EM: Because if it’s put out there, then it lingers and you can process it later, in a more quiet and serious way. But this isn’t always a good thing. The fact that everything is being responded to with humor is also disturbing.

MB: I agree. Humor can be helpful for coping in the moment, but there’s usually something deeper worth exploring.

EM: Yeah, I’ve been in therapy for many years and it took me a long time to be able to speak about things without giggling — you know as I’m doing right now. I remember my therapist asking, Why are you laughing? What is funny about this? It’s a process.

MB: It’s like an inside joke between you and yourself. Except with your art, you’re putting it out into the world.

EM: It’s two different conversations: living within the joke and then working within the joke. Humor is a language that allows me to go to places that would otherwise be too personal. Not too personal in the sense that I would be uncomfortable sharing, but too subjective. Humor connects.

MB: Totally, humor turns personal thoughts into larger conversations. Consumption, voyeurism, oversharing, body image: these ideas obviously come from something personal, but once you put them out there people can relate to it however they choose.

EM: I can’t think of any art that is good that is not open to interpretation. I’m not trying to communicate a specific idea to anyone. I’m just trying to make the work. It’s formal — the setup, the punchline — it has to be understandable in this formal way which also happens to be funny.

MB: A hundred percent. You can give people the tools and set them up for the joke. But the reason they’re laughing is because of what they’re bringing to the table, how they’re experiencing it. What is your earliest memory where you felt a personal connection to art?

EM: I’ve always drawn since before I could speak. Drawing was something that my mother made me do to keep me still. And I always drew girls. I feel like I’ve been drawing Fatebe all my life. I remember being very, very young in Russia and my father showing me a book. It was our favorite book to look at, a book of Hieronymus Bosch’s depictions of Hell. He would show them to me and say isn’t this funny? That was my first experience with art.

MB: And humor right? As a kid understanding that humor can be dark.

EM: Exactly. He was like, this is Heaven this is Hell, aren’t they both funny? I think that was good parenting. That memory shaped my childhood, it feels very personal and very interior. Then when we immigrated here, I experienced Disney for the first time; it was very much America for me, it feels very exterior, very outside the family. The world was Disney in its plastic and its falsity. It was how I learned how things in America worked and what things meant. I would copy Disney cartoons. I really loved the way it looked.

It’s so funny because then you discover art, and go to art school, and explore theory, but you still end up making the thing that you’ve always made since you were child. You still return to your initial love.