Bitch Goddess

Performed at Lithuanian Photographers Union as part of the duo showcase Cannibalisms by Ella Skinner and Ana Lipps (2025)

Bitch Goddess takes its title from the fractured, feverish novel Berg by British working-class avant-garde writer Ann Quin. In Berg, a man named Greb (British slang for a dirty person) attempts to murder the father he has never met and seduce his mistress—a failed Oedipal drama that never quite lives up to its perceived heroic, masculine arc. Greb’s drive for violence and sex is fueled by a hatred rooted in a warped vision of womanhood. To him, women are “Bitch Goddesses”: divine and degraded, dogs and angels—never fully human, only projections of desire and disgust.

Ella Skinner’s Bitch Goddess turns this delusion back on itself. Her work often navigates mental health and its intersections with contemporary culture, politics, and the internet. After witnessing numerous European performances centring female suffering, she observed how often these stagings became fetishistic, voyeuristic, and sexualised—playing into the longstanding trope that a suffering woman is a spectacle to be adorned and then discarded. These portrayals, far from empathetic, further marginalise women’s mental health struggles.

Bitch Goddess parodies this recurring trend in contemporary European performance art—where the feminine is aestheticised, eroticised, and dehumanised under the guise of artistic intellect. The piece was also shaped by Skinner’s own experiences: it became increasingly violent following a personal incident of sexual harassment by an electrician in her home, and the receipt of unsolicited, sexualised comments of her artistic process on Instagram.

In Bitch Goddess, two performers are caught in a feedback loop of self-image and spectatorship, gradually becoming avatars of a misogynistic fantasy. Their hunger—born from objectification and repetition—erupts into violence. The piece is a brutal satire of the gaze and of the genre itself. Yet, with an audience inevitably bringing its own ideals and cultural projections, the work perhaps cannot dismantle the gaze entirely—only parody its persistence, through a mix of excessive gore, repetition, cannibalism and UK bassline and garage music, a staple of British working-class rave culture which Charli XCX, a privately educated, upper-class British electronic musician has stated she hates. 

Performers: Alina Pilecka, Žygis Vainauskas, Ella Skinner

Musical score: Finn McCorry 

Special thanks for technical and installation support: Sophie Durand, Pip Lewi, Matas Satunas, Kristina Tūla