Excellences & Perfections is a five-month Instagram art experiment that pranked Argentinian artist Amalia Ulman’s 96,000 followers. Taking on the persona of the ultimate Insta 20-something, Ulman used her account to portray the perfect life of a young woman who moves to Los Angeles, gets breast implants (the procedure was faked), dines on pretentious food, wears designer clothing, and lives a lavish lifestyle. She even changed her appearance to fit the character.
“It’s more than a satire,” Ulman said in an interview. “I wanted to prove that femininity is a construction, and not something biological or inherent to any woman. Women understood the performance much faster than men. They were like, ‘We get it.’ The joke was admitting how much work goes into being a woman and how being a woman is not a natural thing. It’s something you learn.”
Nearly 200 of Ulman’s photographs will be part of two exhibitions, Electronic Superhighway at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and Tate Modern’s Performing for the Camera .