Martyr

Author: Naivy Pérez

Title: Martyr

Year: 2022

Genre: Installation 

Dimensions: Variable

Materials: Wedding-dressed Sexual Doll.

STATEMENT

“I… take you to be my lawfully wedded wife,
to have and to hold from this day forward,
for better, for worse,
for richer, for poorer,
in sickness and in health,
to love and to cherish,
till death do us part.”

Traditional wedding vows (Anglican version)
Book of Common Prayer, 1549

The work consists of a series of 72 dolls, a direct allusion to the fantasy of the martyr who, after death, is rewarded with 72 virgins. Each figure, posed suggestively and stripped of face or identity, embodies the brutal notion of woman as property, as prize, as sacrifice. This deliberate aesthetic choice insists on the female body’s objectification—not as metaphor, but as inescapable literalness.

Martyr is an installation that confronts patriarchal ideals and dismantles the symbolism of woman as object, offering, and “gift.” The piece presents a decapitated sex doll dressed as a bride, staged in a ritualistic setting presided over by a crucifix. This gesture delivers a searing critique of machismo, exposing how women have been shaped by and for the male gaze: emptied of identity, reduced to flesh, and sacrificed at the altar of beauty and obedience.

The work also gestures toward a more intimate and silent violence: the self-perception of many women who, in pursuit of an imposed ideal of beauty, reshape their bodies to mimic desires that are not their own. It blurs the line between victim and accomplice, between external imposition and internalized submission.

Martyr stands as a visual anthem of resistance—a fierce indictment of how ideals of femininity, constructed and upheld by patriarchy, distort and penetrate both women and men. It is a profane altar, a laceration across the symbolic flesh of gender, where the violence of the myths that still define our bodies and destinies is laid bare.