CAA News Today

Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.

August 2013

Linder’s artwork for the Buzzcocks’ first single, “Orgasm Addict”

Linder: Woman/Object
Kestnergesellscahft Hanover
Goseriede 11, 30159 Hanover, Germany
June 7–August 4, 2013

The first major survey in Germany of the oeuvre of a leading protagonist of the late-1970s punk scene, Linder: Woman/Object brings together more than two hundred selections that capture the diversity of an artistic practice that cuts across music, dance, and fashion and transcends all types of visual media, from collage and photography to video and performance. The exhibition also highlights the feminist politics that underpin the artist’s work and self-staging.

Linder Sterling—known simply as Linder—was born in Liverpool as Linda Mulvey in 1954. By the end of the 1970s, she had become a key figure in the culturally explosive period of punk and postpunk, developing her art alongside bands such as the Buzzcocks, Magazine, Joy Division, and the Smiths. One of her best-known works is the cover of the Buzzcocks’ single “Orgasm Addict,” which shows a naked woman with grinning mouths on her breasts and an iron replacing her head. In 1978 Linder cofounded the postpunk group Ludus, whose singer she remained until the band split up in 1983. She caused a furor in 1982 by appearing—a quarter of a century before Lady Gaga—in a dress made of scraps of poultry. Linder’s work has become internationally known in recent years through presentations at important institutions such as the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Tate, both in London, and with a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York.

Mother Armenia
Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art
1/3 Pavstos Biuzand Boulevard, Yerevan, Armenia
July 3–August 17, 2013

Organized by the 4Plus Documentary Center in Armenia and curated by Svetlana Bachevanova, this exhibition brings together the work of ten female documentary photographers: Mery Aghakhanyan, Sara Anjargolian, Nazik Armenakyan, Anush Babajanyan, Knar Babayan, Anahit Hayrapetyan, Hasmik Hayrapetyan, Piruza Khalapyan, Inna Mkhitaryan, and Nelli Shishmanyan. Addressing the role of women in modern Armenia as well as broader social injustices, their work captures several aspects of Armenian life from a female point of view that remains rarely voiced in the region. “Women in Armenia still battle to establish a career,” the curator says. “Women are still expected to be full time mothers and housekeepers. But these ten documentarians broke the rules and found a way to pursue careers and create powerful bodies of work.”

Installation view of Sturtevant: LEAPS JUMPS AND BUMPS at the Serpentine Gallery (photograph © 2013 Jerry Hardman-Jones)

Sturtevant: LEAPS JUMPS AND BUMPS
Serpentine Gallery
Kensington Gardens, London, W2 3XA, United Kingdom
June 28–August 26, 2013

The first solo exhibition of Sturtevant in a public institution in the United Kingdom, LEAPS JUMPS AND BUMPS showcases work created since the 1970s by this Paris-based American artist, illuminating her groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between repetition and difference while demonstrating the wide variety of media she has embraced. The exhibition includes a large-scale video work, Finite Infinite (2010), and a piece comprising garlands of light bulbs, Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (America) from 2004, that is a later version of a work shown at the Serpentine Gallery in 2000 in the Félix González-Torres exhibition.

Autoritratti: Iscrizioni del femminile nell’arte italiana contemporanea
Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna
Via Don Giovanni Minzoni 14, 40121, Bologna, Italy
May 12–September 1, 2013

Autoritratti features old and new works—including some made specifically for the show—by a large number of female Italian artists. Exploring inscriptions of difference in contemporary Italian art, this exhibition, first proposed initially by Uliana Zanetti, is part of an inter- and extramuseum collective initiative that is investigating the role of gender in the work of contemporary women artists in a country in which second-wave feminism was not influential in the arts. That said, the positions and practices of several women artists clearly demonstrate intriguing negotiations of gender difference.

The title of the show merges references to two important feminist thinkers: the British Griselda Pollock and the Italian Carla Lonzi. The artists in the show are: Alessandra Andrini, Paola Anziché, Marion Baruch, Valentina Berardinone, Enrica Borghi, Anna Valeria Borsari, Chiara Camoni, Annalisa Cattani, Alice Cattaneo, Daniela Comani, Daniela De Lorenzo, Marta Dell’Angelo, Elisabetta Di Maggio, Silvia Giambrone, goldiechiari, Alice Guareschi, Maria Lai, Christiane Löhr, Claudia Losi, Anna Maria Maiolino, Eva Marisaldi, Sabrina Mezzaqui, Marzia Migliora, Ottonella Mocellin and Nicola Pellegrini, Maria Morganti, Margherita Morgantin, Liliana Moro, Chiara Pergola, Letizia Renzini, Moira Ricci, Mili Romano, Anna Rossi, Elisa Sighicelli, Alessandra Spranzi, Grazia Toderi, Sabrina Torelli, Traslochi Emotivi, Tatiana Trouvé, Marcella Vanzo, and Grazia Varisco.

Dame Laura Knight, Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring, 1943. Imperial War Museum, London (artwork © Estate of Dame Laura Knight DBE RA)

Laura Knight: Portraits
National Portrait Gallery
Saint Martin’s Place, London, WC2H 0HE, United Kingdom
July 11–October 13, 2013

With over thirty portraits, this exhibition revisits the work and exceptionally successful career (for a woman of her time) of Dame Laura Knight, among the most popular British artists of twentieth century and the first official female member of the Royal Academy of Arts (since 1936). Knight studied art at the Notthingham Art School, encouraged by her mother, an amateur artist herself, who is remembered setting such ambitious goal for her daughter by saying “one day you will be elected in the Academy.” Knight eventually became so successful that she was featured as a role model in books for careers aimed at women in England.

Knight rejected modernism but focused on capturing modern life and culture through portraiture. She was recognized for her commissioned work as an official war painter, creating propagandistic portraits of female factory workers and heroines of wartime bravery. Yet it is her portraits of theater, ballet, and circus performers, English gypsies, and the segregated black patients of Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Memorial Hospital that illuminate the diversity of the works’ backgrounds, vividness of their style, and the immersive method of their production.

Platform: Josephine Meckseper
Parrish Art Museum
279 Montauk Highway, Water Mill, NY 11976
July 4–October 14, 2013

Josephine Meckseper is known for the cool, seductive conflation of art objects and commodities in her installations, films, and photographs that unmask the political implications of consumer culture. As this year’s Platform guest at the Parrish, she has responded to the museum’s site, using it as “a perfect display platform” that resonates with the use of commercial displays and everyday items in her work. Two vitrines near the museum’s entrance, containing original sculptures and mass-produced objects, introduce visitors to Meckseper’s signature approach, while other works referencing automobile culture engage the museum’s collection and the world outside it. Alluding to both Jean-Luc Godard’s driving-centric film Weekend and the nearby car dealerships, Sabotage Auto Assembly Line to Slow It Down (2009) incorporates car tires, a conveyer belt, two of the artist’s videos on stacked monitors, and mirrored tiles that cinematically reflect the vehicles in transit along Montauk Highway. With its prominent Jeep insignia, Crow (2011) is placed adjacent to John Chamberlain’s crushed car sculpture

Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.

July 2013

Martha Wilson, The Working Girl from A Portfolio of Models, 1974, 6 black-and-white gelatin-silver prints and 7 typed index cards, 20 × 14 in. (artwork © Martha Wilson)

Martha Wilson
Institute of Visual Arts
Kenilworth Square East, University of Wisconsin, 2155 North Prospect Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53202
June 7–August 11, 2013

It’s been already forty years since Martha Wilson radically intervened in Conceptual art by including the female body, especially her own, in her endeavors. She also pioneered uses of masquerade to explore the effects of the camera in self-representation, deconstructing gender stereotypes and exposing the fluidity of gender and identity. Organized by the Independent Curators International and curated by Peter Dykhuis, this traveling exhibition examines the radical strategies and politics that underpin Wilson’s work as a visual artist—especially her performances, videos, and photo-text compositions—and as an activist and the founder of Franklin Furnace from the 1970s to today. Accompanying the exhibition is a catalogue and a parallel program that will raise interesting questions about feminism today, the state of masculinity codes, and more.

Call for Papers: “Recollecting Forward: Feminist Futures in Art Practice, Theory, and History”
Association of Art Historians Annual Conference
Royal College of Art, London, England
April 10–12, 2014

In recent years, a series of blockbuster exhibitions and several high-profile symposia have set out to assess the past and present of feminist art practice, theory, and history. This session seeks to pinpoint and debate the key issues arising from these attempts to make retrospective sense of the past forty years of feminist work in the visual arts. Does this remarkable upsurge in artistic, curatorial, and art-historical interest in art practice inflected by feminism constitute the first step in putting feminism on the map, or else does it draw a line under a diverse constellation of works, practices, and texts that are to remain forever suspended between countercultural revolution and institutional acknowledgement? Feminism’s impact on art practice, theory, and history is frequently presented either as a series of successive “waves” or as a set of (often mutually antagonistic) mother/daughter/granddaughter relations. This session for the 2014 annual conference of the Association of Art Historians aims to redress this focus on linear progression and generational division by reconsidering temporality in feminist art practice, theory, and history. The session chairs invite contributions from practicing artists, art historians, and art critics that revisit and recast historical practices and texts or otherwise explore potential feminist futures in the visual arts.

To foster a productive encounter among a multiplicity of feminist perspectives and to stimulate open dialogue among those who may have come to feminism at different moments in time and from different cultural contexts, the chairs seek short papers of twenty minutes, which will be followed by a roundtable discussion featuring all speakers. If you would like to participate, please email the chairs directly, providing an abstract of a proposed paper of twenty minutes (unless otherwise indicated): Joanne Heath, independent scholar; and Alexandra M. Kokoli, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen. The abstract should be no more than 250 words; proposals should include your name and institution affiliation (if any). You will receive an acknowledgement of receipt for your submission within two weeks. Deadline: November 11, 2013.

Lorna Simpson, Momentum, 2010, HD video with color and sound, 6:56 (artwork © Lorna Simpson)

Lorna Simpson
Jeu de Paume
1 Place de la Concorde, Paris, France 75008
May 28–September 1, 2013

The first major survey of the work of Lorna Simpson in Europe brings together signature masterpieces from all stages of her thirty-year-long career, including examples of the large-format photo-texts from the mid-1980s that first brought her critical attention, such as Gestures/Reenactments, Waterbearer, and Stereo Styles, and several series of screen prints on felt from the 1990s, including Wigs, The Car, The Staircase, Day Time, Day Time (gold), and Chandelier. The show also presents a group of recent drawings called Gold Headed, her Photo Booths ensembles of found photos and drawings (such as Gather and Please remind me of who I am…), and several video installations, including Cloudscape and Momentum, with evocative narratives that question the way in which experience is created and (mis)perceived. As such, the exhibition traces the continuity that underpins Simpson’s experimentation with photography and film and her questioning of the conventions of gender, identity culture, and memory, especially as an African American female artist, while seeking to further illuminate the intimate relationship of text and image that characterizes her work and the centrality of memory among her thematic preoccupations.

Yoko Ono: Half-a-Wind Show
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Gl Strandvej 13, 3050 Humlebæk, Denmark
June 7–September 29, 2013

Another exhibition celebrating Yoko Ono’s eightieth birthday, Yoko Ono: Half-a-Wind Show is a major retrospective that seeks to reinstate her importance as a Conceptual artist, both political and avant-garde, as well as to complicate the experience of her work in various media. The show is introduced by En Trance, a major architectural installation shown for the first time in many years that offers six entry points to her work, alluding to the participatory aspect of her work while enabling different narratives of it to unfold.

The exhibition’s first section features groundbreaking experimental and conceptual works from the early 1960s, performed first in New York and later in Japan. It continues with large installations and recent works and also includes Moving Mountains, a new installation that invites its participants to form mobile sculptures from cloth bags. One area is devoted to Ono’s music videos, concert recordings, covers, posters, and more. The exhibition also emphasizes Ono’s political commitment and her efforts to engage in dialogue with people all over the world—both inside and outside the museum—through social media, billboards, and participation pieces. In Louisiana Park visitors are invited to hang their personal wishes on a Wish Tree, and large billboards throughout Copenhagen display poetic messages from the artist.

Agnès Varda
Bildmuseet
Umeå University, Konstnärligt Campus, Östra Strandgatan 30, B903 33 Umeå, Sweden
June 2–August 18, 2013

Agnès Varda (born 1928) established herself as an important figure in French cinema with her first film, La Pointe Courte (1954), which was considered as the starting point of the French New Wave—even though she was then in her mid-twenties and had no formal training as a filmmaker. Celebrating her lifelong achievement in filmmaking, Bildmuseet is showing a selection of Varda’s documentary projects from the 1960s and 1970s as well as newer works that display the boundary-transcending way in which she moves between the cinema theatre and the gallery showroom, between photography and cinema, and between moving and still images. Many of her films have political and feminist dimensions, such as Black Panthers (1968) and Réponse de femmes (1975), in which documentation and fiction overlap.

Cornelia Parker, Pavement Cracks (City of London), 2012, black-patinated bronze, 206 x 152 x 9 cm (artwork © Cornelia Parker)

Cornelia Parker
Frith Street Gallery
17-18 Golden Square, London, W1F 9JJ, United Kingdom
June 7–July 27, 2013

Bringing together new sculptural and photographic works by the acclaimed British artist Cornelia Parker that transform overlooked and often uncanny facets of the city streets such as pavement cracks, accidental spills, and discarded pieces of wood into evocative objects and images, this exhibition captures a few of the hard-to-pin down threads that mark Parker’s diverse production: her interest in architecture; the antisculptural fragility of her sculptural objects and their mode of display; and the dark, personal, or social evocations and origins of their conception.

The exhibition consists of Black Path (2013), a linear structure of black bronze that hovers above the floor and three-dimensionalizes the cracks of the paving stones of the Bunhill Fields cemetery, through which the artist has been walking her daughter to school, often playing “don’t step on the lines,” a game that rekindled childhood memories and fears of street cracks. Unsettled (2012) uses wood collected from the streets of old Jerusalem, reassembled and precariously relocated against the walls of the gallery. The found abstract patterns on cracked walls provide the inspiration for Prison Wall Abstracts: A Man Escaped (2012–13), a set of twelve photographic prints depicting the perimeter wall of Pentonville Prison in London, whose broken surface of wall had been repaired by workmen with white filler in gestural patterns worthy of any Abstract Expressionist painter. Parker captured these walls before they were obliterated forever by a layer of magnolia paint. “Jerusalem”—both the poem of Bunhill Fields cemetery’s famous incumbent, William Blake, and the “holy city” where Parker filmed her latest work—lace up all three works, especially due to the effect of the Jerusalem syndrome (the tendency of the locals to attribute religious importance to random images) on the artist and the rekindling of her childhood fascination with identifying configurations on the cracked walks of her room at bedtime.

Valérie Favre: Selbstmord, Suicide
Neuer Berliner Kunstverein
Chausseestrasse 128, 10115 Berlin, Germany
June 8–July 28, 2013

Selbstmord, Suicide presents two extensive series of works by the Swiss-born, Berlin-based painter Valérie Favre that respectively deal with life and death. The Suicide cycle (2003–13) consists of 129 small-format paintings representing scenes of self-chosen death, focusing on the moment of the radical decision to end one’s life and the self-dramatization of the theatrical moment of death. The works refer to known suicide scenes from history, art, and literature as well as from current newspaper reports. Created especially for the exhibition, the second group, called still/leben (de la fragilité des fleurs n°5) (2013), consists of small- and large-scale paintings of floral still lifes. Addressing the creative process in a diaristic manner, the artist produced a small still life of a flower arrangement every day three months prior to the show, while adding one brushstroke at a time to the larger canvases. During the exhibition, a different small work is selected daily for exhibition.

Jane and Louise Wilson, Toxic Camera, Blind Landing Lab 1 (H-Bomb Testing Facility, Orford Ness), 2012, C-print Diasec mounted with aluminum and Perspex, 86½ x 71 in. (artwork © Jane and Louise Wilson)

Jane and Louise Wilson
303 Gallery
507 West 24th Street, New York, NY
June 25–August 2, 2013

At 303 Gallery, the twin sisters Jane and Louise Wilson will for the first time combine several bodies of work, including two photographic series: Atomgrad (Nature Abhors a Vacuum) (2010–12), depicting the town of Pripyat, built in the early 1970s by the Soviet Union to house Chernobyl factory workers; and Toxic Camera, Blind Landing Lab 1 (2012), which documents the Wilson’s first publicly sited installation, on a former H-bomb test facility on Orford Ness, an island off the Suffolk Coast owned by the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense.

Pauline Boty: Pop Artist and Woman
Wolverhampton Art Gallery
Lichfield Street, Wolverhampton, West Midlands, WV1 1DU, United Kingdom
June 1–November 16, 2013

Pauline Boty: Pop Artist and Woman is the first survey of this major yet short-lived contributor to British Pop since the rediscovery of her work in a family barn in the early 1990s. Before written out of British Pop’s history and reduced to a pale memory of a mythic figure, Pauline Boty (1938–1966) was included in Ken Russell’s landmark 1962 television documentary Pop Goes the Easel, which introduced her as one of the four protagonists of the Royal College of Art’s Pop scene in London (alongside Peter Blake, Derek Boshier, and Peter Philips). Soon, however, Boty, who had studied stained glass, reinvented herself as a painter by grafting her penchant for abstraction and collage through a figurative Pop idiom and by passionately embracing popular culture—all while speaking subversively as a woman, that is, by using the objects of her fanzine fascination to transgressively celebrate female sexuality and desire and to critically expose the sexism of pop and visual culture.

Bringing together more than forty works, some of which were considered lost and have never before been shown, Pop Artist and Woman traces the development of Boty’s work from a stained-glass student to a British Pop painter and establishes its unmistaken Popness and the radical nature of its politics, especially its feminism. Contextual archival material and an extensive catalogue by the curator Sue Tate further establishes her importance, analyzing her neglect and shedding light onto her life and her brief media stardom as a beauty and an actress. Most important, the exhibition joins other recent scholarship and exhibitions that question the neglect of female Pop artists by standard art history.

Moyra Davey, Kevin Ayers (Psychic), 2013, chromogenic print with adhesive tape, stamps, and ink (artwork © Moyra Davey)

Moyra Davey: Hangmen of England
June 8–October 6, 2013
Tate Liverpool
Albert Dock, Liverpool Waterfront, Liverpool, L3 4BB, United Kingdom

Moyra Davey: Hangmen of England introduces the work of a New York–based photographer, filmmaker, and writer—and a star of the 2012 Whitney Biennial—to the United Kingdom as part of a program called LOOK/13 at the Liverpool International Photography Festival. The project draws attention to the intimacy of Davey’s photographic practice and her use of common objects as starting points to unravel complex themes. For this exhibition, she presents work created using photographs taken in Liverpool and Manchester. As often the case with this artist, these images are influenced by personal stories and by narratives drawn from literature and theory. They were mailed to their city of origin, allowing the creases, tape, and mailing stamps marking each photograph to provide a physical trace of its journey.

The exhibition also includes a new version of the artist’s celebrated Copperhead series. Inspired by the global economic crisis, this series consists of one hundred close-up photographs of the profile of Abraham Lincoln engraved onto the most devalued denomination of American currency—the one-cent coin—to encourage a reevaluation of the fleeting beauty of the everyday. Copperhead reflects on the psychology of money and the varieties of decay brought about by the passage of time.

Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.

June 2013

Carolee Schneemann, Untitled (from the Dust Paintings series), 1984, ink, ashes, acrylic paint, string, vegetable dye, glass particles, photograph on fabric, and circuit board on heavy rag paper, 37½ x 49 in. (artwork © Carolee Schneemann)

Carolee Schneemann: Flange 6rpm
PPOW Gallery
535 West 22nd Street, Third Floor, New York, NY 10011
May 11–June 22, 2013

Titled after a multisensory installation that immerses the viewer in an environment of projected foundry fires, animated by motorized hand-sculpted components cast in aluminum, the fourth exhibition of the pioneering feminist multimedia artist Carolee Schneemann at PPOW Gallery brings together an assortment of works that date from the 1980s to today, illuminating diverse aspects of her expansion of media and her exploration of materials, as well as revealing the politics of her work. In addition to Flange 6rpm, the show features four examples from her Dust Paintings series (1983–86), created with degraded materials, layers of dust, spilled paint, and circuit boards in critical reference to the effacement of Lebanese and Palestinian villages by continuous bombardment. Two major grid installations of photographs and text—Saw Over Want (1980–82) and Vulva’s Morphia (1995)—are also included.

Nicole Eisenman / Matrix 248
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Woo Hon Fai Hall, 2625 Durant Avenue, No. 2250, Berkeley, CA 94720
May 3–July 14, 2013

Curated by Apsara DiQuinzio, Nicole Eisenman / MATRIX 248 brings together approximately forty paintings and works on paper by this New York–based artist created after 2009 that variously contemplate the human condition—though they are specifically inspired by and reflect the post-Bush-era economic crisis and sociopolitical instability. The exhibition includes examples of Eisenman’s first reaction to social turmoil—a series of monotypes featuring weeping people—and other works in which she idiosyncratically grafts historical styles such as American Regionalism and the Italian Renaissance with German Expressionism, updating familiar art forms to make timely social commentaries, as in Triumph of Poverty (2009), based on Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting of the same name, and Tea Party (2011).

Ellen Gallagher, Wiglette from DeLuxe, 2004, photogravure and plasticine, 13 x 10¼ in. (artwork © Ellen Gallagher)

Ellen Gallagher: AxME
Tate Modern
Bankside, London SE1 9TG, England
May 1–September 1, 2013

The first overview of this American artist’s twenty-year career and the first major survey of her work in the United Kingdom, Ellen Gallagher: AxME illuminates signature themes of her exploration of myth, nature, social issues, and art history through painting, drawing, relief, collage, print, sculpture, film, and animation, while inviting the viewer to closely study her fascinating mode of production. Along with key works such as the various series of wig-map grid collages that cast sharp commentaries on black beauty ideals, along with the intricate relief Bird in Hand, the exhibition presents Gallagher’s film installation Murmur (2003–4), her ongoing series of watercolor collages Watery Ecstatic, and a new series called Morphia, comprising two-sided drawings that combine “the intimate with the epic, the urban with the oceanic, the ethereal with the physical, and history with the present.”

Nicola L: Body Language under the Sun and the Moon
Broadway 1602
1181 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10001
May 4–June 22, 2013

Focusing on Nicola L’s radical perspective on the gendered body, whether in pain or in joy, this exhibition introduces the work of an overlooked French artist. Although based in New York since the 1980s, Nicola began her career in Paris in the 1960s as a conceptual artist working in installation, performance, and functional art (since 1976 she also turned to film). A larger-than-life-sized installation, a penetrable sculpture for three performers called The Cylinder, debuted at the Biennale de Paris in 1967 with the rock group the Soft Machine; it was then shown at La MaMa Theater in New York. Pierre Restany welcomed her exceptional vision in his essay “A Long Day’s Journey to the End of the Skin” for her first exhibition at Galerie Daniel Templon in 1969, the same year he hailed Evelyne Axell’s nudes, shown in the same gallery, as signs of sexual liberation.

Nicola’s functional objects became classics of 1960s experimental furniture and soft-art design. But their eroticism is underpinned by an early feminist perspective that merits comparison with the work of several women artists of the sixties onward, whether in France or elsewhere: see, for instance, La Femme Commode (1969–2012), The Lover’s Wardrobe (1967–70), and The Lips Lamp (1969), and soft sculptures such as The Giant Foot (1967–2013) and Giant Woman Sofa (1970–2012). In 1969 Nicola created The Red Coat for Eleven People or Same Skin for Everyone—whose original is included at Broadway 1602—that was first performed with Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970. Characterized as her pivotal “collective object of performance,” the work was used for performances around Europe, including one in Barcelona, where she was arrested by Francisco Franco’s army.

In 1974, Nicola participated in the exhibition Grandes Femmes, Petits Formats at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris, presenting her provocative multimedia sculpture Woman Pregnant from TV (1970). By 1979, the artist moved definitively to New York, where she witnessed and was inspired by the city’s countercultural movements and vibrantly experimental art milieu. In 1981, she directed a film on Abbie Hoffman, the radical social activist and leader of the Yippie movement, called My Name Is Abbie: Orphan of America. Nicola continues to work on her Penetrable Universe series.

Eve Sussman | Rufus Corporation
Bass Museum of Art
2100 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33139
April 12–November 3, 2013

Featuring the Rape of the Sabine Women (2004) and 89 Seconds at Alcázar (2007) and complemented by an interventional installation of photographic stills from both works alongside historical portraits from Bass Museum’s collection, this exhibition interweaves masterpieces of Eve Sussman’s film productions through Rufus Corporation (which she founded in 2003) that dazzle with their opulent settings. Conventionally screened in a darkened room, the twelve-minute 89 Seconds at Alcázar delights with Sussmann’s enactment of the enigmatic moment of court life captured in Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas (1656).

With its five acts inventively presented as a five-part video installation, Sussman’s celebrated Rape of the Sabine Women is a potent interpretation of the myth of Rome’s founding—filmed in Germany and Greece and set in the Cold War sixties—as ideal vehicle for her critique of utopia, power, and gender relationships in comparable historical settings of hope and decadence. Although Rape of the Sabine Women was made as a feature film, the action of its presentation at the Bass unspools on over thirty screens—including sprawling wall projections, a houselike construction, several tiny video monitors, and a massive installation of television sets piled randomly on the floor—and offers a mesmerizing immersive filmic experience that enhances the visual poetics and the power of Sussman’s reinterpretation of the Roman legend with government agents and Greek butchers’ daughters.

Niki de Saint Phalle, My Monster, 1968 (artwork © Niki de Saint Phalle/BUS 2013)

Niki de Saint Phalle: The Girl, the Monster, and the Goddess
Moderna Museet
Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Sweden
April 20–December 1, 2013

Capitalizing mainly on the Moderna Museet’s comprehensive collection of works by Niki de Saint Phalle, largely thanks to Pontus Hulten and a generous donation by the late artist, this exhibition captures the centrality of the figures of the girl, the monster, and the goddess in de Saint Phalle’s artistic universe, exploring its autobiographic and feminist underpinnings and advocating the importance of the artist in the twentieth-century postwar avant-garde. Enhanced by archival material that reflects the reception of her Ur-Goddess, She – A Cathedral, constructed for the museum in 1966, the exhibition evokes the meeting of the girl, the monster and the goddess in de Saint Phalle’s film Daddy and is accompanied by a new documentary on the artist.

VALIE EXPORT: Images of Contingence
Żak | Branicka
Lindenstrasse 35, Third Floor, Berlin D-10969 Germany
April 26–June 16, 2013

“For me, contingence is how and where you perceive borders, and how and where and when borders explode,” said VALIE EXPORT, and it is the exploration of a variety of borders that Images of Contingence illuminates by highlighting the artist’s interest in physical contact and its implications in various media, including installation, drawing, photography, film, and archival materials. Along with the installation Fragments of Images of Contingence (1994), in which light bulbs hanging from poles and wires are sensuously yet dangerously immersed into cylinders filled with fundamental-to-our-existence liquids such as milk, used oil, or water, and its rhythmic pendant, The un-ending/-ique melody of cords (1998), a recording of a threadless sewing machine and its sound, the exhibition brings together a selection of videos permeated by issues of contingency, liminality, and sensual experience. The show also includes the artist’s celebrated Touch Cinema, performed in Munich in 1969, for its political activation of touch. A series of drawings from the early 1970s, depicting hands that protect and caress or cause suffering, complements this showcase of EXPORT’s negotiation of borders by illuminating her contradictory exploration of touch and the female body as ciphers of intimacy, sensuality, and carnality, as well as violence and aggression.