Woman Laughing Alone with Salad borrows its title from the viral search term that yields images of slim, cheerful women—lightly made-up, brightly dressed, and beaming over bowls of salad. These sanitized stock photos reflect a cultural ideal that equates thinness with healthy, feminine, and socially desirable.

Beneath the surface, this imagery reinforces fatphobic norms: while thin bodies are celebrated, fat people are routinely depicted as faceless, gluttonous, or morally failed. This contributes to a cultural pathology that sees fatness not as a variation, but as a problem to be fixed.

Merkein’s work disrupts these narratives. In Woman Laughing Alone with Salad, the figure wears
hyper-feminine makeup echoing American child beauty pageants, exposing the performative expectations placed on women. The t-shirt Daddy’s Little Girl points to themes of dependency, patriarchy, and bodily control. A suckling pig and an oversized cake appear in stark contrast to the usual imagery of restraint—undermining the binary between indulgence and discipline with grotesque humor.

The photo shooting was accompanied by a performative dinner party.

Performative dinner party at Das YIX, Vienna (AT), 2014

Photo (120x80cm), 2014, exhibited at:

– Atelierhaus Salzamt, Linz (AT), 2014
– Die NÄHMASCHINE, Mönchengladbach (D), 2015
– Stadtgalerie Nordhorn (D), 2023