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This year the yearly photography exhibition that features as part of Summer of Photography, opens up to the feminine universe to explore the concept of ‘gender’. The main theme revolves around the state of women “Woman: The Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s“, offering a series of works, over 400, by 29 female artists.
The idea inspiring the exhibition is the female imaginative notion and its becoming through a visual masculine domination. All the works on display come from the Viennese Sammlung Verbund and represent the feminist perspective of a group of female artists and the story of how they managed to translated a stereotype through a diverse set of visual expressions.
Sammlung Verbund’s director Gabriele Schor, is responsible for having designed the feminist artistic movement of the late 70s as a feminist Avant-Garde to highlight its innovative peculiarity.

Many of the works are Francesa Woodman’s, an american photographer, who was considered a real child prodigy in such an uncommon field as photography and known for her black and white shots and for the dreamlike aura of her self-portraits.
She committed suicide at 22 and has left over 800 works, but the public is familiar only with a quarter of them. Woodman welcomes us in her surrealist universe where she is at the same time heroine and captive. She transmits us fear, isolation and death as her main characters through which she tells her tormented life.  White sheets wrap her models up like in Magritte’s paintings. Hidden shapes remind us of corpses and ghosts, protagonists of a decaying world. The ruins and the broken shapes that frame these landscapes cry a silent scream, reaching out for the only possible catharsis, death.

Another artist we discover at this exhibition is Cindy Sherman, considered one of the most influential and original female artists of our time.
Versatile and tireless, Sherman transforms real and imaginative characters in new ones: the leaders of kitsch dimensions, sunken by photos, slogans and publicity.
Revisiting roles and characters, mostly feminine, Sherman unmasks the grotesque vulgarity and the poetic misery which hide behind every message.

The feminine theme takes a more intimate dimension in the exposition: “Where We’re at! Other voices on gender”.
This time African and Caribbean female video artists and photographers take the stage, to develop the theme of femininity in their art. Conceived as part of Summer of Photography, to explore the interrelation between genders, this exhibition presents the work of artists who significantly contributed to the participation and exposure of women in art after 1980s.
The artists decided to show the extent to which femininity, or what it really means to be a woman, is in the midst of diverse cultures and religions, where sexual discrimination is generously spread over several layers of discrimination generating a toxic cocktail.
Racial and sexual intolerance are mixed together and the female body becomes a jail that suffocates and suppresses that tender embryo, savagely fighting for their right to be. The being contorts itself through a maze of adventures to follow unreachable dogmas dictated by stupidity and hatred.
The only antidote to survive? Being oneself, swimming far away from predefined and stark lines to construct oneself. A search that eases the becoming. To be without showing off, daring to be able to look back, finding yourself and accepting it.

Women who have been able to look outside, not merely of themselves but of their condition, have been able to go beyond the first look and face others on their culture, ignorance and comfortable commiseration. Finally these artists, these women, have spoken of themselves, with dignified nobility transforming the gloom and harsh reality of life into poetry.
Summer of Photography is open to visitors until the 31th of august 2014 at the Bozar in Brussels.

Didascalie immagini

1. Francesca Woodman, Self Portrait Talking to Vince, 1975–78 Black-and-white photograph
2. Cindy Sherman, Untitled (Lucy), 1975/2001 Gelatin silver print
3. Zanele Muholi, Miss Lesbian I, 2009, C-type print Photograph: Sean Fitzpatrick
4. Angele Etoundi Essamba, Heritage 3, 1999, 70×100 cm, dibond et plexi

In copertina:
Zanele Muholi, Miss Lesbian II, 2009, C-type print Photograph: Sean Fitzpatrick
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