Film & Video (Film & Video)

Hershman Leeson’s documentary, Women Art Revolution (W. A. R.) draws from hundreds of hours of intimate interviews with her contemporaries—visionary artists, historians, curators and critics—who recount their fight to break down the barriers facing women both in the art world and society at large. The film features an original score by Carrie Brownstein, formerly of the band Sleater-Kinney.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Herculine’s Prophecy by Juliana Huxtable features a kneeling demon-figure on what appears to be a screen-print, placed on a wooden table, which has then been photographed and digitally altered to appear like a book cover, with a title and subtitle across the top, and a poem written across the bottom. This composition is stuck to a metal plate by a series of button magnets, with interjecting phrases on them. The juxtaposition between the mysogynistic, almost puritan poetry that stripes across the bottom and the powerful crouching pose that the femme demon assumes inverts the hegemonic text , instead creating a space of alterity.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Naama Tsabar’s sculptural works are developed serially. The series Work on Felt references the history of post-minimal sculpture: from Robert Morris to Joseph Beuys’s social sculptures. However one can equally relate her work to 1970s conceptual performers such as Terry Fox or Paul Kos.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Historical representations of the female form and the clichés and misunderstandings that surround them have been the subject of recent research and historical revision. Marry, Fuck, Kill by Ruth Patir reimagines sculptures of fertility goddesses from ancient times as real-life women by animating them as a moving sculptural bodies. In a country such as Israel, where the presence of ancient ruins are common, if not everyday for some, this work speaks both to the present and the distant past, and draws continuities between.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Domes #1 represents a significant moment in Chicago’s career when her art began to change from a New York-influenced Abstract Expressionist style to one that reflected the pop-inflected art being made in Los Angeles. By 1968, the year she began creating Domes , the twenty-nine-year-old artist had moved from Chicago to Los Angeles, graduated from UCLA, and was part of a generation of artists whose work was characterized by of the masculine overtones of Southern California’s flourishing car culture. Inspired by new technologies in the auto manufacturing, these “Finish Fetish” artists appropriated industrial materials such as car paint or lacquer to create artwork with pristine finishes.

Photography (Photography)

Noticing the lack of archives on the queens of various African kingdoms, artist Ishola Akpo created several series of work that retrace their history. Akpo uses different mediums in these projects, as a metaphor to the complex stories of the figures and their true political weight. One part of the project, the Agbara Women photographic series, employs fictional portraits that sheds light on the queens’ histories.

Painting (Painting)

Got Your Back by Gisela McDaniel depicts two women of color from different ethnic backgrounds who share similar violent experiences. However, the sitters never met and were depicted separately by artist Gisela McDaniel. The painting is thus an artificial construct, whose warm, gentle and seemingly benign look Is undermined by the accompanying soundtrack detailing their horrific experiences.

Painting (Painting)

Rojas’s two pieces in the Kadist Collection— Untitled (four-legged…) and Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) —are representative of her pictorial style which uses bold colorful blocks of paint and female and animal characters. While Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) does not depict any actual women, it nevertheless alludes to gender roles and the power of the female gaze. Apparently playful, this scene of two animals has an ominous quality: A bird and a hedgehog confront at each other and the bird appears to be poking, even eating the hedgehog’s eye.

Textile (Textile)

In the exhibition Pink as a Cabbage / Green as an Onion / Blue as an Orange , Asli Çavusoglu pursues her work on color to delve into an investigation into alternative agricultural systems and natural dyes made with fruits, vegetables, and plants cultivated by the farming initiatives she has been in touch with. Yet, rather than formulating the history of a particular color, the artist thinks through color, bringing together the various stories and models numerous farming initiatives in Turkey. The fabrics – each corresponding to a unique initiative – evoke the question: How have the social uprisings in Turkey during the last decade shaped the way we reimagine sites of everyday resistance?

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In Erin Jane Nelson’s 2019 body of work Av, panels are covered in collaged images and shellacked with resin or epoxy: photographs of plants intermingle with pictures of men and women engaging in various spiritual activities, cartoons of mothers and their children, or black and white images of window panes. The panels and ceramics act as backdrops upon which Nelson attempts to establish connections between the natural world and the various cultural and religious orders we impose upon it. She incorporates Jewish symbolism and archival photographs alongside her ongoing photographic practice documenting the environmental collapse of her home region.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The year 2016 is organized like a telephone book; the data corresponding to the contributions are classified in alphabetical order by the name of the donor. With this database as well as other types of information, the 900-page book presents a material representation of the scale of the cross over between cultural philanthropy and the financing of political campaigns in America. It also provides an unprecedented resource for discovering the political leaning of the museum sector.

Photography (Photography)

On New Year’s Eve in 1965, Lisette Carmi met and photographed a group of transgender people living and working on the Via del Campo in Genoa–the main street for prostitution in the city, located in the former Jewish ghetto. This encounter was the beginning of a seven year relationship with the group, and led to the publication of I Travestiti (1972), a controversial book that comprised all of the images Carmi took of the group between 1965-1971. Forming close friendships with the people she portrayed, the artist rented an attic near Via del Campo in Genoa to live with them, she captured the everyday lives of the group, depicting sex work from a new perspective.

Textile (Textile)

In the exhibition Pink as a Cabbage / Green as an Onion / Blue as an Orange , Asli Çavusoglu pursues her work on color to delve into an investigation into alternative agricultural systems and natural dyes made with fruits, vegetables, and plants cultivated by the farming initiatives she has been in touch with. Yet, rather than formulating the history of a particular color, the artist thinks through color, bringing together the various stories and models numerous farming initiatives in Turkey. The fabrics – each corresponding to a unique initiative – evoke the question: How have the social uprisings in Turkey during the last decade shaped the way we reimagine sites of everyday resistance?

Painting (Painting)

Madani works on a small scale and a large scale. This work is from a series of small paintings called Dazzle Men that take as their starting point the Dazzle patterns used by artists to camouflage ships during the First World War. Dazzle camouflage was designed to confuse the aim of U boat commanders.

Painting (Painting)

The work Timur Merah Project 2, the harbour of restless spirit is stretched out on a full cow’s hide, replicates the Kamasan Balinese painterly language that Citra Sasmita has developed in her recent works. It represents female figures, flames, and various natural elements, permutating whimsically in a narrative of pansexual energy. While rooted in mythological thinking, with specifically Hindu and Balinese references, the scenes are equally part of a contemporary process of imagining a secular and empowered mythology for a post-patriarchal future.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Reflection Paper No. 2 is one of four videos in which Wang attempts to accurately illustrate the writings of influential Chinese Eileen Chang, who published her works during the Japanese occupation of China. Image and text reflect on the everyday experiences of women in society, family, marriage, love, and death.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

I’ve heard stories (2008) is one of Marwa Arsanios early works. It is a short animated film staging a story that took place at the Carlton hotel in Beirut. This work is the first part of a longer project on this iconic building.

Painting (Painting)

Sahana Ramakrishnan’s work blends cultural influences, spanning a range of visual mythologies, she weaves together a tapestry of pop cultural references that are upended by the artist’s exploration of identity, sexuality and gender perspectives. Narrative journeys are central to myth, and Ramakrishnan’s own journey through culture, mythology and sexuality is echoed in the physical matter she uses to create her work. The artist embarks on Odyssean quests for her materials.

Painting (Painting)

Rojas’s two pieces in the Kadist Collection— Untitled (four-legged…) and Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) —are representative of her pictorial style which uses bold colorful blocks of paint and female and animal characters. While Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) does not depict any actual women, it nevertheless alludes to gender roles and the power of the female gaze. Apparently playful, this scene of two animals has an ominous quality: A bird and a hedgehog confront at each other and the bird appears to be poking, even eating the hedgehog’s eye.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The chapter Ayousha , of Judith Barry’s Cairo Stories , is a portrait-like work that consists of one plasma screen and one framed photograph. The project developed out of oral archives made from 215 interviews, which Barry conducted with women of varying social and economic classes in Cairo between 2003 and 2011. Her research started at the beginning of the Iraq War and concluded just after the Arab Spring.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Greek mythology, Arachne was a talented mortal weaver who challenged Athena, goddess of wisdom and crafts, to a weaving contest; this hubris resulted in her being transformed into a spider. EE-0 is the first episode of the Europa Enterprise project which looks into new, feminist readings of established Eurocentric myths and reconsiders the meaning of cultural heritage and the production of artifacts for the future. In EE-0 , the Greek myth of Arachne is re-contextualized through a poetic script, taking an imaginative leap from antiquity into science fiction.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Ana Navas uses humor to address formal, aesthetic, and societal conventions that are interwoven in the everyday through the normalization of gendered behaviors and style choices used to project personal and collective signifiers. In her Donation Vases she uses quotes taken from corporate coach Lois P. Frankel’s book Nice girls (still) don’t get the corner office: Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers (2004). The aspirational, somewhat cynical tone of the sentences – “When given a choice, sit next to most powerful person, their power will cascade over you,” “Why is it that women buy those little chains to hang reading glasses around their necks,” “If you see your reflection on a glossy surface & notice something wrong, avoid fixing it there” – reveals a particular understanding of what a professional, ambitious cis woman should look like, the persona she should project, and the type of desirable behaviors that constitute a stereotypical “successful woman” according to a capitalist morality.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Kubra Khademi’s work celebrates the female body and in her detailed drawings and paintings she portrays female bodies floating on white paper. Specifically she portrays the two bodies she had access to when she learned how to draw: herself and on occasion her mother. She represents women as warriors, goddesses and shameless playful heroines in search of pleasure and discovery.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Kubra Khademi’s work celebrates the female body and in her detailed drawings and paintings she portrays female bodies floating on white paper. Specifically she portrays the two bodies she had access to when she learned how to draw: herself and on occasion her mother. She represents women as warriors, goddesses and shameless playful heroines in search of pleasure and discovery.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Kubra Khademi’s work celebrates the female body and in her detailed drawings and paintings she portrays female bodies floating on white paper. Specifically she portrays the two bodies she had access to when she learned how to draw: herself and on occasion her mother. She represents women as warriors, goddesses and shameless playful heroines in search of pleasure and discovery.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Creole Portraits III alludes to the 18th century practice by slave women on Caribbean plantations of using tropical plants as natural abortifacients. As an act of political resistance against their exploitation as “breeders” of new slaves and to protest the inhumanity of slavery, some slave women chose to either abort or kill their offspring. Armed with practical knowledge passed on orally from their African ancestors and/or Amerindian counterparts, enslaved Creole women collected the seeds, bark, flowers, sap, and roots from various plants which allowed them to secretly put an end to their pregnancies.

Textile (Textile)

The title for this body of work, Poco se gana hilando, pero menos mirando , is based on a Spanish saying that underestimates feminized crafts or tasks, implying that it is better for a woman to be doing ‘something’, no matter how useless it is, instead of just doing nothing. This series of works by Claudia Gutiérrez Marfull features embroideries that represent the peripheral and marginalized landscapes of Puente Alto commune in Santiago, the city’s biggest district and its most southern outskirts. In 2015, when this work was produced, there was not a single health service provider, police station, pharmacy, daycare or school in the whole area of Puente Alto.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Simpson’s sculptural practice connects architecture, clothing, furniture and the body to explore the functional and sociological roles and the influence of the design and architecture of various cultures and periods in history. Her sculptures hold very specific references and are developed and transformed through revised drawings to create hybrid forms that are directed by her means of construction and choice of materials.

Textile (Textile)

In the exhibition Pink as a Cabbage / Green as an Onion / Blue as an Orange , Asli Çavusoglu pursues her work on color to delve into an investigation into alternative agricultural systems and natural dyes made with fruits, vegetables, and plants cultivated by the farming initiatives she has been in touch with. Yet, rather than formulating the history of a particular color, the artist thinks through color, bringing together the various stories and models numerous farming initiatives in Turkey. The fabrics – each corresponding to a unique initiative – evoke the question: How have the social uprisings in Turkey during the last decade shaped the way we reimagine sites of everyday resistance?

Film & Video (Film & Video)

La libertad is a “greca” film, a meander film, with no beginning nor end, weaving together fragments of daily life at the Navarro´s, counting threads and time, wondering and wandering around words as emancipation, labor, and freedom (la libertad), the word that most appeared in our conversations. The “greca”, the meander, is the main symbol weaved in the textiles made by the Navarro sisters, from Santo Tomás Jalieza, México. A geometrical form of an endless braid of diamonds, the “greca” represents corn, an entity worshiped by the pre-hispanic civilisations of Mesoamerica.