Mademoiselle

Exhibition

From 21 July 2018 to 6 January 2019

Curator: Tara Londi

Mademoiselle is a group exhibition that brings together a generation of
international women artists who explore the issues and paradoxes of being a young woman today, through a variety of mediums and a broad range of subjects.

Referencing France’s recent ban on the title ‘Mademoiselle’ and drawing upon the past years’ global interest in women’s rights, best characterized as the #MeToo phenomenon, the exhibition exposes the manifold heritage, expansion and evolution of feminist art strategies and theories today.

The choice of selecting only women artists is not meant to reflect on the existence of ‘essential differences’ between art produced by men or women and assert the existence of a ‘female aesthetics’, but rather to explore the evolution of art forms and subject matters closely associated, if not initiated and introduced by the feminist movement of the 60s and 70s in the work of a generation of women artists who have benefited from its ground-breaking efforts.

These include identity based art, body art, crafts-based art, and collaborative methods of working among others, as well as social/political concerns, such as the study of representation, ideology, and iconology of violence against women, discourses evaluating women’s position in the economics and power structures of labour, and a critique of traditional models of femininity.

To establish a conceptual framework I employ art theorist Amelia Jones’s concept of ‘parafeminism’, ‘para’ meaning both alongside and beyond, extending but not superseding earlier feminisms. Jones argues that the most significant legacy of feminism is a broader articulation of the politics surrounding the body, as a lived and living manifestation of the political effects of being variously positioned (identified) in today’s global economies of information and imagery.
Mademoiselle unfolds as a journey where each of the nine rooms is not only curated to address its own specific issues but designed to communicate with other rooms in the exhibition space highlighting the differences and polarities among the art works presented.
The entrance room, displaying, among others, Elsa Sahal and Nevine Mahmoud’s
erotically charged works representing female fragmented body parts as fetishized in the male gaze, speaks to the very last room in the space on the top floor, where the gaze is reversed by women’s sexual estimation of men and sexuality at large, as in the works of Celia Hempton, Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova. Sara Cwyner’s reflections on consumerism, “soft” sexism, power and obsolescence, among other musings, contrasts with Liv Wynter’s installation and performance piece in the next room, denouncing the empty rhetoric and indifference surrounding attacks on women in the private sphere.
Sanam Khatib’s work, introducing the powerful dominance of female figures in paintings that evoke medieval tapestries, thus attempting to re-write art history from a female perspective, is positioned in a top floor section with views on the ground floor area where Anna Uddenberg’s and Verena Dengler’s futuristic sculptures examine the evolution and faith of female power and its symbolism. And so forth.
Mademoiselle elaborates on contemporary prototypes of femininity, women’s oppression and suppression, social and personal Relationships, collective rights, individual empowerment by hedonism and narcissism, media visibility and a general sexualization of culture. It reflects upon pervasive models of ‘youthitude and femininitude’ - embodied in the concept of the Young-Girl in Tiqqun’s in ‘Preliminary Material for a Theory of the Young Girl’- as desirable ideals in consumer society and culture at large and as regulators of integration and success within it.
It is with a candid or calculated disregard for conventions and taboos that the artists expose the convergence of diverse feminist histories with other aspects of identity politics and social critique, supplanting the concept of a singular feminist narrative, questioning the myth of shared womanhood, and identifying contemporary obstacles for women’s emancipation.
All is questioned with a sensibility that is above all coloured with an unprecedented brand of humor which seems not only to provide the critical distance to assess both the gains and the losses of feminism but also to serve as a winning strategy to negotiate new possibilities of feminist practices and ideology.

Tara Londi