Artist: Zula Tuvshinbat
Eat me
tapestry, wool, 2023
This artwork is part of the exhibition Imagining Queer Utopia, curated by me (Michał Rutz) at Queer Museum Vienna.
Eat Me depicts a colossal vulva shaped like a mandorla winged by a pair of crouched legs in black boots. At its center appears the direct imperative “EAT ME.”
Divine Threshold
The use of mandorla is surprising. This almond-shaped halo, employed in religious art, traditionally envelops sacred figures, marking the threshold between the human and the divine. Here, Tuvshinbat fuses the holy with the corporeal, creating a liminal zone in which the sacred and the erotic intertwine—not as opposites, but as complementary forces.
Scale and colors as a markers of intensity
The exaggerated size of the vulva does not function as a representation. It’s not meant to depict a literal, realistic, or symbolic female body. Instead, it acts as a formal and affective tooI— a marker of intensity. It indicates the overwhelming force of sexual and simultaneously spiritual experience in which the subject risks losing itself. In Bataille’s terms, such intensity drives the body toward ecstasy and self-dissolution. This impression is echoed in the absence of the head—the loss of self—while vivid rays of orange, red, and pink erupt from the center, signaling ecstasy and/or orgasm.
Between seduction and danger
At the same time, the magnified lips, flanked by spread legs, appear threatening: so monumental that they seem capable of devouring the viewer, like a carnivorous plant. The command EAT ME oscillates between seduction and danger—a playful yet potentially deadly invitation to cunnilingus. But who is meant to be eaten? Is this a trap, or an erotic game that thrives on risk? Desire, fear, and excitement coexist here. As Silvan Tomkins suggests, affect does not operate as a single emotion, but as an assemblage of sensations, allowing attraction and threat to be experienced simultaneously—thereby intensifying the experience as a whole.
Monstrous feminine vs devouring mother
While it is difficult to avoid the Jungian archetype of the devouring mother when reading the work, I refuse to interpret it through this pathologizing lens, which moralises and reinforces cultural anxieties surrounding women’s bodies, reproduction, and sexual power.
Rather, the work should be read through the framework of the “monstrous feminine,” which offers an understanding of the representation of women, female sexuality, and the body that goes beyond simple pathology or fear. I prefer to understand it as a radical, pre-linguistic exploration of affect, oscillating between attraction and threat without recourse to moral judgment or pathology.
Unruly organisms
Both Zula’s and Bartosz’s artwork appear as living, unruly organisms—each dominated by a mouth-like form with an insatiable appetite. Devouring jaws become the threshold to a new reality.
Michał Rutz
Continue reading about Bartosz Kokosiński’s Painting Devouring a Rural Landscape.