CAA News Today

Visitors in the Musée du Louvre in 2020 © Antoine Mongodin

In the spring of 2021, the CAA Museum Committee initiated a survey of our members for the purposes of revising current directions and charting new ones that respond to updated knowledge of their concerns.

The August “Picks” from the Committee on Women in the Arts respond to the danger and uncertainty that characterizes the contemporary moment and explore how gender figures into the possibility of imagining new forms of collectivity.

Malgorzata Markiewicz, “Medusa: Sensing-With and Thinking-With the World,” 2021. Print on textile. Photo by Grzesiek Mart

Mona Hatoum
April 16 – September 12, 2021
Institut Valencià d’Art Moderne

Mona Hatoum received the Institut Valencià d’Art Moderne’s Julio González prize in 2020, and this exhibition is a tribute to the influential body of work she has created over the last two decades. Across her installations, sculptures, drawings, and textiles, Hatoum’s investment in materializing spatial concepts as instruments of power asserts itself with a poetic and severe consistency. This spatial refrain emerges from the histories she inherits as an Arab woman, but Hatoum is also committed to showing that oppression can be mapped across the globe. Empty and haunted, ephemeral and permanent, each of Hatoum’s pieces creates an aperture for seeing and sensing the pervasive threat of vulnerability that cannot be cordoned off with neat geographical boundaries.

Double Trouble
July 8 – September 21, 2021
Institute of Contemporary Art of Maine College of Art

The double has often meant trouble for women, as it can encapsulate an assembly-line definition of woman and a Stepford-wife loss of control. This exhibition, however, features the work of five artists who explore the double as a resource for upending habitual definitions of the self without indulging in the fantasy that one can leave historical patterns behind. Creating echoes of bright colors and bold graphic forms, the artwork in Double Trouble is immersed in Pop-like patterns–wallpaper is a recurring motif–as if to watch for the differences that slip free from repetitions.

Malgorzata Markiewicz: Medusa: Sensing-with and thinking-with the world
July 15 – September 30, 2021
Triangle, Riverside, Illinois

Malgorzata Markiewicz’s Medusa makes the production of textiles a form of feminist world-making. Slowly, persistently, intentionally, over seven months of the Covid-19 health emergency, Medusa’s crocheted body emerged, spreading with its fifty-feet long tentacles into the space, first from Markiewicz’s home in Kraków, Poland, and then into her studio. Markiewicz made Medusa with three double-warp fabrics specific to Podlasie, a region in the northeast of Poland. The figure of Medusa stands at the center of this exhibition, masked and regal. Her densely textured form also appears in a film, walking across a meadow and through a forest, and in a series of photographs that stage a liberating journey that moves away from the fear, disgust, and shame traditionally associated with Medusa and toward a new feminist way of sensing-with and thinking-with with the world.

New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century
August 28 – January 30, 2022
Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archives

New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century is a major survey exploring recent feminist practices in contemporary art. Rather than defining feminist art, New Time reveals all that the category can encompass as artists respond to the unfolding of history in the present. Although artworks made since 2000 are the primary focus, the objects and installations on view span several generations, mediums, geographies, and political sensibilities. New affinities emerge—the silhouettes of Kara Walker resonate with the sculpture of Kiki Smith—and convey the heterogeneous, intergenerational, and gender-fluid nature of feminist practices today.

Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter
May 21, 2021 – September 12, 2021
The Jewish Museum, New York

Louise Bourgeois viewed her artistic practice as a form of psychoanalysis. Rather than relegating that claim to a footnote or a biographical aside, this exhibition makes it central. Freud’s Daughter places Bourgeois’s original psychoanalytic writings, which include dream recordings and process notes, in dialogue with 40 works of art. These texts, many of which have not been seen before, become their own form of artmaking. They attest to Bourgeois’s onerous, often lyrical, and profoundly feminist struggle to loosen the Oedipal confines placed around women’s capacities to imagine and materialize different forms of feeling.

Wangechi Mutu: I Am Speaking, Are You Listening?
May 7 – November 7, 2021
Legion of Honor Museum, San Francisco

Wangechi Mutu’s I Am Speaking, Are You Listening? intervenes in the Legion of Honor’s homage to the classical imaginary of Euro-American culture. Many of her gorgeous sculptures portray earthy hybrid beauties who stand for the vulnerable physicality western culture systemically inflicts on people of African descent. Vibrant, damaged, and thoughtful survivors of colonial extraction, Mutu’s figures rhyme with the museum’s canonical objects but also register the pathologized differences Black bodies are made to bear. The Legion of Honor is known for Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker (1904), which dominates its atrium entrance, and in his field of vision, Mutu has placed bronze sculptures of corpses covered with opaque blankets that suggest a crime scene. Except for the hands with polished nails and the feet decorated with red stilettos that stick out from the edges of the blankets, the bodies are not visible. But the feminized excesses—one of the artist’s prominent themes—evoke other possibilities for thinking that Mutu has begun to create through her dialogue with histories of willed silence.

Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy
May 19 – August 29, 2021
Whitechapel Gallery, London

This definitive retrospective of the British-Argentinian artist Eileen Forrester Agar (1899–1991) demonstrates just how much her work absorbed and foresaw the twentieth century’s wide array of aesthetic innovations. Agar was included in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition, and her rebellious oeuvre certainly captures its feminist potential, but Angel of Anarchy resists the impulse to identify her work only or primarily through Surrealism. Exhibiting over 150 artworks and newly discovered archival material, Angel of Anarchy captures Agar’s nimble travels through artistic mediums, movements, and hierarchies to better see the bright, undulating landscapes of erotic anarchy she created in their wake.

Pauline Curnier Jardin, Fat to Ashes
April 12 – September 19, 2021
Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin

In 2019, the French artist Pauline Curnier Jardin won the Preis de Nationalgalerie, and the film installation Fat to Ashes lives up to the epic scale that might be associated with such an honor. In the historic halls of the Hamburger Banhof, Jardin has created a large-scale amphitheater with material that looks like pie dough—edible, soft, and supple. Inside the arena is a bright red seating area, and the elevated screen appears amidst draped fabrics of translucent pink. The film interweaves three scenes: the procession of St. Agatha in Sicily, the slaughter of a pig, and the carnival in Cologne. Jardin’s cinematic triptych, with its sensual, tactile visuality, portrays the excess and death swirling around the center of collective existence.

Lynn Hershman Leeson: Twisted
June 30 – October 3, 2021
New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York

Twisted is Lynn Hershman Leeson’s first solo exhibition in New York City and tracks her prescient engagement with technology—its sinister and generative impact on corporeal life. The exhibition displays Leeson’s drawings (many of which have never been seen before) and wax sculptures from the 1960s, and together they express her interest in the body’s porous boundaries and detachable parts. Twisted of course includes Roberta Breitmore (1973–1978), the well-known performance series that exemplifies feminist art’s look into the empty heart of identity. A new multi-media installation, Infinity Engine (2014–present), is also part of Twisted. Commissioned by ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Infinity Engine is a simulacrum of a genetics laboratory that replicates its world of science, technology, and self. “Twisted” is a great title for this exhibition: it evokes a sinister sickness, cords, the strands of a DNA molecule, and collaboration. Working with scientists, Leeson revitalizes the historical connection between art and scientific research, but her primary collaborators have always been viewers. She addresses her audience with her accessible message that technology does not have to cancel out the human, but can actually be part of realizing its ethical potential, and creates generous invitations for a participatory response.

The June Picks from the Committee on Women in the Arts highlight a selection of events, exhibitions and calls for work that include feminist and womxn artists, and address issues about social justice, the visibility of marginalised subjects, and the digitisation of the everyday. Several of the exhibits engage with the question of relations among the human, non-human and other-than-human bodies but also corporeal entanglements that embed us within the world through embodied experiences. 

“Anne Minich: Her Bone” installation view of interior gallery

Anne Minich, Her Bone
May 22 – June 26, 2021
Thomas Erben Gallery

This solo exhibition of the Philadelphia-based artist Anne Minich engages with the materiality of the human body. Working across different media Minich explores the themes of pleasure and sexual desire, memory and intimacy, to develop personal mythologies and question the boundaries of corporeality. Her transversal language emphasizes the lived experience of being in the body, living it and dying in it. The works reveal multiple kinships and invite a closer inspection of bodily experiences. The interrelationality is emphasized by unexpected juxtapositions between the media used by Minich, including drawings, wooden sculptures and three-dimensional paintings, and found objects such as shells, fruit pits or bones. Intimate and fragile, these painterly collages invite the viewer to feel and sense with.

Susanne M. Winterling, TEMPERATE – under your skin, nano carriers through the web of life
May 20 – September 19, 2021
Schering Stiftung

Susanne M. Winterling’s installation TEMPERATE confronts the viewer with a fluorescent bacterium, inviting us to engage with nano-organisms that are invisible to the naked eye. Questioning that which is visible and that which remains invisible, the artist created large projection surfaces that show the bacterium moving across scientific images. Playing with scale, Winterling offers us another perspective in which magnified nano-organisms are larger than the visitors, articulating complex relationships between humans and microorganisms and interrogating the relevance of anthropocentric views. Inspired by research on drug-loaded nanocarriers, Winterling collaborated with Simone Schürle, a biomedical engineer and professor for Responsive Biomedical Systems at ETH Zurich along with her research team to bring awareness to the productive relations between forms of life and specifically bacteria equipped with therapeutic agents.

SHILPA GUPTA: Today Will End
May 21 – September 12, 2021
M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp

Shilpa Gupta’s multimedia works bring visibility to the contemporary art scene in Mumbai Critically engaged with identity politics and psychological discourse, Gupta articulates relationships between human diversity and new aesthetics, exploring entanglements between subjectivity and perception often via interactive installations and audio and visual technologies. Context-related and referring to specific cultural and socio-political framings, her works concern themes that, at the same time, are open to interpretation and may become localised to develop new micro-narratives. Gupta’s interest in conflict, borders and censorship can be seen in this exhibition, in which the artist traces the role of diverse media in the production of fear.

Hito Steyerl. I will survive. Physical and virtual spaces
May 19 – July 5, 2021
Centre Pompidou

This exhibition of Hito Steyerl’s major works is a retrospective in reverse, showing the most recent pieces at the beginning, which then lead to the artist’s 1990s films displayed at the end of the show. It is a collaboration between Centre Pompidou and the K21 Düsseldorf. The multimedia installations, some of which have been designed specifically for the exhibition, are a satirical and critical gesture exploring the relationships between the digital worlds, artistic creativity and its presentation, the pandemic and current social conditions. Steyerl’s point of departure is the architecture of the Centre Pompidou, which for over forty years has supported the heritage mission of the museum as a democratic project of a cultural resource centre. Steyerl engages once again in an intimate and astute manner with the invisible contradictions that drive the power structures of global capitalism and interrogates the challenges encountered by cultural institutions in the current moment of crisis.

AD MINOLITI: Biosfera Peluche / Biosphere Plush
July 24, 2021 – May 8, 2022
BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art

The exhibition of works of Ad Minoliti, a contemporary Argentine artist, takes place in the Baltic in the form of an ‘alien lounge’. Imagined as an extra-terrestrial space that goes beyond the idea of nature, it traverses dichotomous gender and anthropocentric narratives exploring non-binary and non-human identifications and embodiments. This first institutional presentation in the UK and the largest exhibition to date in Europe also features Minoliti’s ongoing project The Feminist School of Painting, which transforms part of the gallery space into an active classroom holding bi-weekly painting workshops. In her practice Minoliti activates feminist and queer theory to deconstruct the traditional genre of painting and art historical narratives, and generate alternatives that are intersectional, inclusive and diverse.

A Yellow Rose Project
June 1 – September 15, 2021 (virtual tour available)
BU Art Galleries

A Yellow Rose Project, a collaborative photography project between women from the United States, was initiated in 2019 to mark the 2020 centennial anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment. On that day women wearing yellow roses, symbolising the fight for equal representation, gathered into a concerted bodily collective and waited to hear if their right to a voice in the government would finally be granted. The photographs in the project engage with the complicated narratives attached to the 19th Amendment and its anniversary, and confront a multitude of histories, some of which are more visible than others. A remarkable historical event to celebrate also marks a troubling moment when only some women were given the right to vote. The collection of visions and voices opens up a dialogue on the power of the movement that led to the ratification, but also on erasures and the need to remember. The presented body of work celebrates women’s resilience and bodily gestures, including the gesture of the taking a photograph, that create a visual archive of vulnerability that through a concerted collective effort becomes a strength in the common.

Photo Vogue Festival 2021: REFRAMING HISTORY Open Call

Who is telling the story? The 6th edition of the Photo Vogue Festival ‘REFRAMING HISTORY’ invites projects that propose an alternative, different way of telling a tale. Selected projects will be featured in the exhibition.