Seongsan Art Hall

Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975, single channel video, black and white, sound, 6min 33sec, Courtesy of Martha Rosler and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen is a meditation on how society views women. One by one, Rosler picks up various cooking utensils, from aprons and forks to rolling pins and kitchen knives, and swings them in the air as if to demonstrate their use. These familiar movements, so often found in everyday kitchens, here feel aggressive and violent. At the end of the video, Rosler uses her entire body to represent the letters U, V, W, X, Y, and Z. The superimposition of the female body and these inexplicable letters of the alphabet effectively separates signifier from signified, providing a semiotic clue toward the deconstruction of the overarching kitchen-woman-cookware connection.