Film & Video (Film & Video)

Our Grandmothers’ Gardens by Olga Grotova is based on the history of Soviet allotment gardens, which were small plots of land distributed amongst the families of factory workers to compensate for poor food supply in a country that was over-producing weapons. Beginning in the 1960s, Grotova’s great grandmother and grandmother tended an allotment garden for three decades, after their release from an all-female gulag camp for “enemies of the people”. These camps detained wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters of men executed during Stalinist repressions.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Yétúndé Olagbaju’s On becoming a star series recuperates the figure of ‘Mammy’, a stereotype rooted in American slavery that typically depicts a larger, dark skinned woman as a maternal presence, often within a domestic setting, and typically taking care of white children. After being referred to as a Mammy during their undergraduate degree, Olagbaju began exploring the figure in 2016 as a means of healing. Olagbaju’s first presentation on this topic was a book called Black Collectibles: Mammy and Friends (1997) that sells tchotchkes—like salt and pepper shakers or figurines—of the racist mammy image taking different forms, from which Olagbaju exorcised the Mammy images by carefully cutting them out of the book with a razor blade.

Photography (Photography)

Our Grandmothers’ Gardens by Olga Grotova is based on the history of Soviet allotment gardens, which were small plots of land distributed amongst the families of factory workers to compensate for poor food supply in a country that was over-producing weapons. Beginning in the 1960s, Grotova’s great grandmother and grandmother tended an allotment garden for three decades, after their release from an all-female gulag camp for “enemies of the people”. These camps detained wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters of men executed during Stalinist repressions.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Priapus Agonistes by Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley is the first work in The Minotaur Trilogy (2013-2015), a trio of videos that reimagine the Greek myth of the Minotaur. The monstrous result of Queen Pasiphae’s infatuation with a bull, the Minotaur lived in a huge maze known as the Labyrinth where he would devour sacrificial offerings of youths and maidens. Traditionally, the story centers on Theseus and his heroic (and successful) quest to conquer the Minotaur, subsequently freeing the people of Athens from their obligations.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Part of an installation commissioned by National Gallery Singapore, The Weaver’s Lament by Erika Tan addresses the invisibility of women textile artists and their labor. Tan’s video focuses on the story of a forgotten weaver, Halimah Binti Abdullah, who participated in the 1924 British Empire Exhibition in the United Kingdom. A minor figure in the exhibition histories of what was formerly known as Malaya, Abdullah’s loom was left behind at the end of the exhibition, now residing in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Sofía Córdova’s film dawn_chorusiii: the fruit they don’t have here / coro_del_albaiii: la fruta que no tienen aquí weaves together six California migration stories that resist dominant social narratives that flatten the experience of migrants. Though each woman’s story is based on interviews conducted by Córdova through voice memos or phone calls, the women’s lines in the film are reinterpreted and altered by the artist as a gesture that affords them opacity and relative anonymity. The opening sequence begins with four of the women looking into the camera, reciting a poem about the transition from winter to spring in Spanish and Mandarin: the birds dropping seeds they brought from afar, planting saplings that grow into trees bearing the fruit they don’t have in their new homes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Letter to a Turtledove by Dana Kavelina is a short film based on a poem written by the artist. Delivered as a monologue and presented with subtitles, the poem encapsulates the traumas, grievances, horrors, dreams, and hallucinations that have descended upon Ukraine’s Donbass region since its invasion by Russia in 2014. Appropriating amateur footage shot during the war in the Donbass region, Kavelina’s film weaves sound and image into a poignant tapestry that considers the absurdity of war.

Photography (Photography)

Our Grandmothers’ Gardens by Olga Grotova is based on the history of Soviet allotment gardens, which were small plots of land distributed amongst the families of factory workers to compensate for poor food supply in a country that was over-producing weapons. Beginning in the 1960s, Grotova’s great grandmother and grandmother tended an allotment garden for three decades, after their release from an all-female gulag camp for “enemies of the people”. These camps detained wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters of men executed during Stalinist repressions.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Laís Amaral abstract paintings dialogue with the feminine power. Just like the flow of a river, Laís produces her paintings as a flux that emerges from within, an inner force that relates to all the women in her life, family, and ones who know the medicinal powers of nature; who are part of this feminine force latent in the earth. In order to discover elements about herself, Laís Amaral understands painting as a gesture of leakage.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

There is no there by Gabriella and Silvana Mangano is a black and white looped video with sound, in conjunction with a live performance. The work is inspired by the Blue Blouse, a political propaganda theater movement which spread across the Soviet Union in the mid-1920s. More specifically, the work takes the form of ‘Living Newspapers’, which were performances based on topical news events.

Painting (Painting)

Secrets Between Her and Her Shadow 10 by Maryam Hoseini is from a series of paintings of the same title that are inspired by the story Layla and Majnun – an Arabic love story about Majnun, a 7th century Bedouin poet, and his lover, Layla. Hoseini’s compositions are visually inspired by the illustrations accompanying the Khamsa of Nizami , a manuscript of five poems, including Layla and Majnun , produced by the Persian poet Nizami in the 1590s. Unlike the original tale, Hoseini’s paintings focus entirely on Layla, any male characters are purposefully erased from this narrative.

Painting (Painting)

Dindga McCannon created the radiant portrait Ima: Real Estate Mogul from the Harlem Women’s Series by first stitching material together with a sewing machine and then using more traditional painting techniques to render a portrait of Ima, a woman from Harlem who was a real estate developer from the 20th century. As with other works in the series, McCannon completes the portrait by hand beading a personal and cultural iconography of signs and symbols around the edges of the canvas. The work is spiritual in the sense that it has an energy that comes from its directness and from the human hand.

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)

Monteverdi Ici – Deeply, Feeling Filling the World by Laure Prouvost is a tapestry that references a video by the artist entitled Monteverdi Ici (2018). Both artworks feature a woman’s naked body as a central visual element. In the video, the woman’s body is outdoors, with her back to the camera, moving her arms gently through the surrounding flowers.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Concerned with the early history of Singapore, Zai Kuning spent many years living with and researching the history of the Riau peoples who were the first inhabitants of Singapore. Inspired by the women of Riau, Back to Mother seemingly traces the central role of maternal figures in nourishing of Riau’s history as an early archipelago kingdom that was Hindu, Buddhist, and animist prior to 14th-century Muslim invasion. Organic materials such as beeswax form a layer of balm protecting threads of red paint symbolic bloodlines in a turtle-formed mandala—a primordial womb that recalls the Hindu and animistic origin of Singaporean society.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Leyla Stevens’s two-channel video Patiwangi, the death of fragrance is an immersive video installation that addresses erased histories. In the left channel, set in a fine museum storage facility, art conservators unfurl and inspect modernist Balinese paintings, prints, and sculptures. In the right channel, Javanese-Australian dancers, Ade Suharto and Melanie Lane, echo each other’s movements.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the performance video Vitrina , María Teresa Hincapié stood inside a storefront window in downtown Bogota, unannounced, for eight hours a day, wearing a uniform and initially carrying out cleaning chores. As the day and passers went by, the routine became more playful: she would send kisses to bus drivers on the busy Avenida Jiménez who would return them, use the newspaper with which she was shining the glass to flirtatiously hide and engage with an improvised audience or draw the shape of her body with soap and a sponge. She would interrupt these chores to carry out other ‘feminine’ activities, like brushing her hair or applying make-up, only to return to frantically cleaning the transparent surface that separated her from the public.

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.

Painting (Painting)

In borrowing and subverting images from popular culture, Sadie Benning exposes the media’s role in constructing false and oppressive stereotypes of women, with regard to gender and sexual identity. This small painting, titled Mom , is a concise, eloquent visual statement. Many of her paintings incorporate found imagery, family photos, and everyday objects.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

No Lye by Danielle Dean documents a group of five women, including Dean herself, confined to a small, cramped bathroom, communicating only by using slogans culled from beauty advertisements (“beauty is skin deep”, “naturalise, it’s in our nature to be strong and balanced”) and quotes from political speeches (“we must protect our borders”, “we are fighting for our way of life and our ability to fight for freedom”). The result is a fragmented conversation that defies legibility. As sounds of a possible conflict rise from outside, the characters work together producing what looks like explosives from soap, towels, and an unmarked blue liquid.

While most of Ashmina Ranjit’s work has been large-scale installations, often immersive and site-specific, the series Hair Warp – Travel Through Strand of Universe is a brilliant concentration of both her beliefs and aesthetic. In this series, human hair is treated as a sacred element that connects womanhood and as Ranjit states, “all phenomena beyond the sky”. In the painting, the sinuous hair strands morph constantly into different braids, swirls, and landscapes, emitting a mysterious force of life.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Fly was first commissioned as an immersive video experience for Meriem Bennani’s first solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 in 2016, imitating the mosaic structure of a fly’s eyes with a patchwork of projectors. As a single channel video, this work focuses more on the succession of sequences, shot in Bennani’s hometown of Rabat, showing interviews with relatives, an open-air market or a wedding, and jamming them with surreal digital manipulations. A recurrence throughout the film is a fly that accompanies us along the journey, as a childish motif or the symbol of a vanitas , able to sing Rihanna’s song.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Monteverdi Ici by Laure Prouvost is a non-narrative video work that depicts the back of the artist’s naked body standing, with her back towards the camera in a field. Her bare arms gesture outwards and forwards, as if her movements are influencing the wild flowers billowing in the foreground. Alternating between the artist’s body and imagery of leaves, flowers, cats, and caterpillars, Prouvost speaks directly to the viewer, stating: “The world behind that field would be here, the world would enter through here”.

Photography (Photography)

Susan Sontag, the author of On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others, was captured through Hujar’s now-iconic photograph in a relaxed yet pensive pose. A friend and supporter of his work as well as his subject, Sontag wrote the introduction for Hujar’s only book published during his lifetime: Portraits in Life and Death.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Sandra Monterroso’s video performance titled Corazón del lugar del viento (Heart of the Place of the Wind) is inspired by Seis Cielo (Six Sky), the only female Mayan ruler to be represented in classical Mayan stelae (historical monuments dedicated to the record of important events). As the artist impersonates the ruler and goddess, she performs a ritual of tying stones and an offering of clothing. Seis Cielo’s ties with the lineages of the prehispanic Tikal and Dos Pilas kingdoms were essential in understanding the role of Mayan women as mothers and wives, and especially as rulers and healers.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk . The genre, which was popular in the 1950s-60s, has since been forgotten, without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theater. The most distinctive formal trait of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is that the theater performers are exclusively women.

Painting (Painting)

In this untitled acrylic painting, Tessa Mars explores the long-lasting effects of colonialism on the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, particularly in terms of female vulnerability and resilience. Drawing on her interest in retelling stories of her native country, and confronting the past and the present, Mars portrays her cultural essence and heritage by imagining spiritual spaces that connect people and land across time. With a pictorial practice that highlights pastel colors, the divinisation of the figures on the canvas and the spiritual elements within the composition ultimately enhance the narrative of her Caribbean ancestry while conflating the distinctions between autobiographical and historical events.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk . The genre, which was popular in the 1950s-60s, has since been forgotten, without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theater. The most distinctive formal trait of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is that the theater performers are exclusively women.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk . The genre, which was popular in the 1950s-60s, has since been forgotten, without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theater. The most distinctive formal trait of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is that the theater performers are exclusively women.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

And words were whispered by Sancintya Mohini Simpson is a series of ten works on paper based on the lived experiences of Indian women taken to the Natal region of South Africa from the 1860s to the early 1900s to work in tea and sugarcane plantations during apartheid, which included servitude in its broadest and most sinister definition. This often-overlooked chapter in colonial history is close to the artist, as her maternal family was contracted to a sugar plantation in Natal, then one of the four British colonies in South Africa. These indentured servants, derogatorily called ‘coolies’, were employees by title, but were effectually slaves.