ROY presents: Nat Portnoy

42 days

42 Days focuses on the moment of confrontation with a terminal disease, disability and a difficult family relations, examining their impact on the manifestation of fear, pain, desperation and desire. The film is a visual diary, where the author takes the viewers onto a journey of different realisations regarding her personality, identity, body, needs and disillusionment surrounding the lack of control. This film speculates whether it’s possible to fully accept and embrace one’s fate.

Warning: The film contains triggers such as mental and physical disability, self-harm and death.

Nat Portnoy is a multidisciplinary queer artist, graphic designer, performer, filmmaker, and activist, born in Poland in 1987, currently based in The Netherlands. Nat is working with mediums such as video, installation, object, photography, and painting. Her projects are mainly based on theories of sociocultural construction. She is interested in examining the cognitive processes of pleasure, exploring its connotations with fetish, self-representation, identity, ritual, and the complexity of language used to determine desire. In her artistic practice, she likes to refer to existing ideologies and beliefs, examining them through the knowledge of a collective and personal experience.

ROY Asks

what is your name and preferred pronouns

My name is Nat Portnoy, she/her they/them

how has art (whether it be your own or art in general) changed you? 

Art has been always a driving factor in my life, first, it was a way of moving within the world and learning about it. It has become for me a way of communicating with others,  without a need of justifying that need of connection. Creating, and responding to, art is something that keeps me going and helps me cope with emotions.

how did you start your artistic practice? 

When I was 2 years old, I drew a figure of my dad on the doors, my mother refused to wash it off. She celebrated my curiosity and talent, gathered all my artworks, applied for grants and funds. I was passionate about art, but she let me believe I can commit to it.

when a first-time viewer sees your work, what is the first word that you hope they think when looking at it? 

I'm trying not to hope for anything when it comes to other people's perceptions. I respect the audience and I want to trust them, I'm trying to give them space for interpretation, to open a dialogue without imposing anything. My only wish is to not bore them.