greenface
In December 2016, Yelena created two images using black body paint she had from a Sinterklaas celebration. The first showed black paint on her face, the second on her arm and fist. By January 2017, she made a third image, covering her upper body in black paint and adding a white beauty mask to her face. When these images were posted on social media, they stirred controversy, leading to accusations of blackface, prompting Yelena to repeatedly take them down due to the intense reactions. This experience initiated a difficult, internal dialogue on race, representation, and art’s power to provoke. While black body paint is not illegal and remains available in costume stores, applying it to one’s face has become socially unacceptable in the Netherlands. As a response, Yelena began using green body paint—a neutral "green screen" that lets any skin tone or ethnicity be projected onto it—redirecting the project toward representation without assumptions about identity or race. Through her earlier explorations of art historical body language, Yelena was drawn to studying how people of color were depicted within Western art. This new project interrogates not only the gestures and postures of people of color in historical artworks but also the loaded connotations of servitude and exoticism imposed by colonial perspectives. By using postcolonial theory, she critiques how colonialism has shaped these portrayals, questioning dominant Eurocentric lenses. This decolonizing effort encourages anti-discrimination by reframing historically marginalized figures beyond stereotypical or subservient roles, creating space for nuanced, culturally respectful interpretations. Through this work, Yelena’s project opens a conversation on how body language in art can perpetuate or challenge power dynamics, questioning who gets to represent whom and how.
