text by Hanna Sage Kay
The experiences of womanhood Zarina Nares chronicles—those forces of toxicmasculinity, celebrity culture, and social conditioning thatinevitablycome to bear on usall—take shape as videos, artist books, and electronic music that faithfully speak tocertain universal (female) truths, which, due to their very ubiquity, have been gaslit intononbeing—just like the women that they befall.
The patriarchy is balding and you’re suffering the consequences
In a haptic, horizontally-formatted, 23-page, spiral-bound book titled TIKTOK + THE PATRIARCHY + THE 4TH DIMENSION (2023)—that could just as plausibly be the product of an incredibly high person or a genius (is there a difference?)—Nares charts a course between shopping addiction as a palliative for sadness and transcending to the fourth dimension en route to the matriarchy. Between points (a) and (b), she lays out a series of Venn diagrams and flowcharts that map, via TikTok screenshots, the causal relationships between shopping, sadness, dating, and the need to look hot, which brings us right back to shopping (illustrating better than anything that our primary occupation under capitalism is not work, but spending money).
This leads Nares to what she calls, the “war on the crone” and the omnipresence of anti-aging products foisted upon women of all ages, which instill—not at all accidentally, her book claims—a rampant fear of age thirty-five. Nares explains that we younger millennials are beset by an internalized fear of this seemingly arbitrary age, not because it has any significance for us, but because it's when “approximately 66% of men will have experienced some degree of hair loss.” Now who should be scared of age thirty-five? The patriarchy, she says, that’s who.
In what I imagine as the voice of a wellness coach or TED talk presenter, Nares writes: "Release the pressure to find love and have kids by thirty-five and recognize the receding hairlines around you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” A true prayer for a more liberated womanhood. And in due fashion, the book concludes with a page that reads: “Welcome to the matriarchy,” featuring porn cutouts of women sitting astride harnessed men, riding them whip in hand into a desert sunset.
But so much for liberation. The first printer that Nares approached to produce TIKTOK + THE PATRIARCHY + THE 4TH DIMENSION refused to do so because of this climactic final page. The person relaying this news to Nares was herself a woman, encapsulating Nares’ very concern—echoed throughout her work—that women unconsciously further the very patriarchal systems that they otherwise consciously work to dismantle.
So, what started as an investigation of shopping trends on TikTok and why they’re so often the result of feelings of sadness came to engender Nares’ conspiratorial diagnosis of the consummate ways that capitalist patriarchy has infiltrated not only our social norms, operating systems, and conceptions of beauty and womanhood, but infected our innermost thoughts, feelings, and desires.
“Early criticism of media culture,” Nares says, “is about what’s being given to us. But we know that the forces outside of us are evil. These things aren’t going to change…. What became scary for me is not what other people are posting, but what I’m posting and how capitalism can be so internalized that I’m exploiting myself.”
I am abundant. I am happy. I have everything I want.
Is anything more emblematic of our self-exploitation in the service of capitalism than a haul video on TikTok? Not only are these individuals the consumers, but they’re also making the commercials for free, in their own time.
In doing so, some appear to reap real pride and confidence from their new purchases, others market their wares as influencers, and the most vulnerable of the lot may be seen crying over mounting debt. The broad spectrum of emotion conveyed by the creators of these videos evinces that shopping can function simultaneously as a comfort, an advertisement, a privilege, and an addiction.
And so, over a barrage of shopping haul TikToks wherein certifiable Amazon addicts share their bounty, Nares has programmed an AI-generated text-to-voice TikTok narrator to repeat a variety of affirmations such as “I am abundant. I am happy. I have everything I want” and “I do not worry too much about what everyone else is doing” in a video titled Meditation For Releasing The Capitalist Patriarchy Within (2022).
In an irreverent bid to cultivate a semblance of agency and autonomy for those of us (all of us?) ensnared by capitalism’s darker forces, these affirmations stand in tension with TikTok excerpts that Nares looped to repeat a single word or phrase, such as: “Amazon,” “They’re literally obsessed with me,” “Kendall wears it all the time,” or “I saw Cady Heron wearing army pants and flip-flops, so I bought army pants and flip-flops.” Interspersed throughout Meditation For Releasing The Capitalist Patriarchy Within, these glitched sequences serve as a bewitching voice of the capitalist patriarchy (what Nares calls “Your Spirit Guide’s Frequency”) that spur our continual drive to buy and fuse conceptions of selfhood with the products we’re conditioned to want and need.
When collaged together in rapid succession by Nares and ornamented with a record of rapidly increasing debt ticking away at the top of the screen, the TikToks that comprise her video may read as an easily humorous barrage of excessive consumption, a sly take on the annals of the internet where Amazon is a drug and celebrity its dealer—but Nares is more “interested in that moment right after the laughter stops, where it’s not so funny anymore, and you have these moments of reflection.”
What consequently rises to the surface is a distinct awareness of the fact that you’re laughing at real people (or at least a very real condition of our world). Despite the calculated chaos with which they’re presented, the TikToks that Nares culls together linger on the subconscious with an aftertaste of pity, and some small doses of (guilt-ridden) relief that they are not immediately relatable. While pity and the distance that art and social media prescribe might allow us to see ourselves as a step apart, the guilt of this rather voyeuristic position serves as a reminder that Nares’ video, and the TikToks that comprise it, are not so much a distant allegory, but rather an acute representation of an inescapable condition that we are all subject to under capitalism. We might not all document our hauls on TikTok, but we are all party to the same gross systems of consumption that have made such videos a valid form of expression in this economy wherein material possessions and the ability to acquire them are the one true arbiter of our self-worth.
Through laying bare such cycles of shopping and sadness, consumption and debt, Nares’ work implores us to ask whether we are so subsumed by these systems that our wants and needs are no longer distinguishable from the patriarchal engine that we’re furthering via an insatiable drive to buy those products that Kendall Jenner and Cady Heron (as capitalist avatars) tell us we need to … feel happy, get a date, and look hot.
Hoes that know
Between a chorus of “hoes that know” in DIVINE FEMININE AWAKENING (2021)—a song released by Nares on the album “once I completely detach myself from reality and transcend my physical form, it’s over for you hoes”—a soft female computer-generated voice one would expect to find on an app for guided meditations shares her wisdom for the construction and maintenance of an empowered self. “To be a woman is to feel pain so deeply. To be a woman is to be shamed for our bodies, our biology, and our very existence.” But she goes on to say, “You must unlearn that feeling of powerlessness because, my dear, you are incredibly powerful.”
What’s hardest to reconcile about DIVINE FEMININE AWAKENING is the lack of irony with which it is received. Hypnotized by the truth—which feels shamefully cringe-worthy—she leaves us only with the will to: “Inhale your power…. Exhale your fear, shame, guilt, blame, hurt, pain. It isn’t yours, and it no longer serves you.”
And so, in a work that absents the humor that so often serves as a conduit for those unfiltered truths that define Nares’ work and instead adopts a sobering explication of the capitalist (balding) patriarchy that unavoidably shapes our lives, DIVINE FEMININE AWAKENING rather sincerely asks us to stop, listen, and take what’s ours.
But wait, not so fast! Nares’ song is bookended by advertisements on SoundCloud—even though the platform attempts to masquerade as a free resource for artists—making it impossible not to wonder, as Nares does, if her creative output has “just become another capitalist wellness product for empowerment,” further anesthetizing us (against her will) to the will of the patriarchy.