Silenced Womb
(2024)
author(s): Petra Kroon
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022
Master Photography & Society
In Silenced Womb Petra Kroon ( @fotosvanpetrakroon) examines the age-old taboo on menopause. What does it mean to be systematically silenced for centuries? What effect does it have on how you are represented? How you are treated? And how do you behave? She explores these questions from three perspectives: the medical world, society and photography. She investigates what this in/visibility looks like and analyses what it does to her and to her allies. Since she wants to lift this taboo on menopause, she also makes some suggestions for a different representation.
The impact of the audience on the actresses
(2023)
author(s): Dalida Shaheen
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
Welcome to Dalida Shaheen's exposition Master's candidate in acting program and actress. Firstly, in 2019, I played a role of a woman who got married to a married man, after the series aired to the public the role fired back on me. I observed audience's reaction exceeded everyone’s expectations. The audience is divided into two parts the first part is about the women who expressed their anger in a very aggressive and strong way, and the second part who was exciting to the character. The first part of the audience used several offensive, strong, and insulting words. The audience’s reaction was very emotional, and they used all the tools to express their feelings for example, they used social media platforms and verbal violence when they see me in the street. Hayat is the character I have created to explore my questions in my short fil.
The film is the method I used to explore my questions of what would happen when the audience can’t distinguish between the role and the actor’s real character, What is the impact of the audience on the actresses?
Adding to the Narrative: Intersectional Feminist Critical Curatorial Practices in Classical Vocal Music Performance
(2022)
author(s): Shanice Skinner
published in: KC Research Portal
Diversity and inclusion within Western art music have become topics of elevated importance in in recent discussions. To create enduring results regarding these matters, there needs to be a commitment to in-depth study of practices that will produce visible change. This is one of the goals of my research, in which I tackle issues of representation by focusing on Black women composers and their absence from the canon as overlooked and marginalized artists. It is well known that women have been denied many opportunities throughout history; as composers, many experiences crucial to professionalism were not always available to women, including music education in composition, the publication and circulation of their works, not being hired as conductors, or receiving reviews from influential critics. These opportunities and resources dwindled further if a woman was also a person of colour. Thus, in order to ensure their inclusion within the canon, these underrepresented identities demand and require unique recognition.
I have examined the issue of neglected women of colour composers in classical music from an interdisciplinary standpoint, utilizing the methodologies of history and experimentation to form an “intersectional feminist critical curation” framework. This framework implements knowledge from intersectional feminist theory and music curation practices in order to answer following questions: “What is the impact on new audiences of diverse backgrounds experiencing classical music through an intersectional feminist curatorial framework?”, "Can classical music be an effective device for messages of social and political change?", and “What is the impact on myself as a classical vocalist and a Black woman to implement an intersectional feminist curatorial framework within my musical study and performance?”. The overall goal of this research was to discover an effective way forward to achieving diversity in classical music for underrepresented groups. Drawing from this study, I have created a digital performance project entitled “The Narrativity Sessions,” which functioned as an experiment utilizing this knowledge of intersectional feminist theory and praxis fused with select critical curation strategies applied to my own artistic practice as a classical singer. The outcome was a novel artistic practice that can contribute to creating innovative and artistically fulfilling performances while simultaneously advancing diversity and inclusion in the classical music sphere for audiences, performers, and composers alike.
falling like a monster
(2021)
author(s): Susanna Hast, Maryam Bagheri Nesami
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Falling Like a Monster is a collaborative and creative practice of writing and embodying inter-textuality and multi-modality in order to experiment a non-representational archive known as a two-sided article. This heterogenous crafted piece of writing resists the hegemony of academic and artistic narratives and suggests a transformative knowledge and an alternative practice of political freedom. In our writing, crafting, recording, and failing, we are playing with exhaustion, silence and stillness as monstrous counter-strategies.
En egen trykkpresse
(2020)
author(s): Ane Thon Knutsen
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
A Printing Press of One’s Own (En egen trykkpresse) is a practical examination of the relationship between art and technique, hand and spirit, thought and printing ink. The project came out of an interest in the printed medium in a digital age. Book printing has been the dominant technology for setting and mass reproducing of the printed word from when Gutenberg popularized the technique in the 1450s, and until well into the 20th century. Thon Knutsen set out to search for a professional position which allowed her to combine an artistic approach to typography and graphic form with her technical insight and historical knowledge of book printing. She found Virginia Woolf. The canonised modernist author and the feminist icon worked in parallel with both her writing as artistic practice and as typesetter and printer in her own private printing press. Through in-depth close reading of Woolf's authorship, seen through the first-hand experience as typesetter and printer, Thon Knutsen has found new ways to read Woolf, and a direction for her own artistic and research-based practice. Thon Knutsen has recreated the short story that Woolf printed in her debut, The Mark on the Wall, in its whole, but with a new aesthetic appearance. She has done this with a method that Thon Knutsen claims must have been used by Woolf; the thought and the writing must have been influenced by the experience of setting and printing as a pendulum between the spirit that writes and the hand that sets.
The Visual Silence
(2020)
author(s): Mia Engberg
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
The Visual Silence explores a cinematic aesthetic that approaches silence and darkness and challenges the voyeuristic tradition of cinema. It is a cinematic form that is situated in the gap between what is projected and what is perceived, between the impression of the ear and that of the eye. The Visual Silence examines the possibility of new perspectives through the deconstruction of the image and also through a critical examination of patriarchal, excluding and exhausting methods in the traditions of filmmaking. The research project resulted in the feature film Lucky One that premiered 2019.
Objects that Matter - Performance Art and Objects
(2019)
author(s): Pilvi Porkola
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
The Study on Objects (2018-) is an ongoing art project that focuses on everyday life objects we are surrounded by. While considering the objects and working with videos, I contemplate the relationship between new materialism and performance art. Feminist new materialism offers a perspective to explore many performance art works that reveal how we are related to objects and how we deal with them.
The Body + The Lens: Shrink, Wax, Purge, Bleach.
(2019)
author(s): Tyler Payne
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
"The Body + the Lens: Shrink, Wax, Purge, Bleach" was a creative practice research project that investigated the relationship of (white) women’s embodiment to the lens of gendered advertising. To focus the research, a recently mainstreamed group of female cosmetic rituals were chosen — body-contour wear (SPANX), Brazilian waxing, salt-water cleansing, and fake tanning. The intent of the research was to interrogate the relationship between these body-correcting practices and the idealized image of the "Glossy Magazine Girl" — i.e. preternaturally thin, hairless, and unblemished by shades darker than pink — which now appear with more frequency in women’s everyday life, and have reconfigured the social construction of female gender. The (artistic-research) response to the subject matter was a series of video and photographic works in the genre of self-portraiture. These works attempted to critique the new norms of embodiment emerging through these practices through the researcher’s parodic undergoing of the cosmetic rituals themselves. This "carnal" methodology, following from the methodology of Louis Wacquant, is one that embodies the researcher in the social practices being researched, i.e. body-correcting practices. This method produced research results — embodied and affective — not available to purely observational research, which should interest the artistic research community and feminism generally. The images and videos de-fetishize and denaturalize the embodied product of the cosmetic rituals. My studio-led research reveals the intractable, comic "failures" in the face of the demands placed on the everyday performance of women’s gender. By doing so, it turns these failures to affirmation, as well as critique of the gender norm these practices construct.
In the softness of the belly... There is a war on women
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Andrea Bonderup
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In the softness of the belly… There is a war on women is a testimony to the lived stories of abortion from a perspective which transcends time and national borders. This research paper is structured around two intertwined trajectories with varying text formats and writing styles. This structure merges the personal with the political and explores their relationship as it reveals how they can’t be separated in a society with deeply rooted structures of patriarchy and misogyny.
The first trajectory chronologically tells the story of the author's own experience with abortion integrated with the personal stories from friends and family members. The process of dealing with abortion is gradually laid out starting from childhood memories, proceeding into the practical turmoil and the contradicting emotions surrounding the experience itself, moving onto the mental and physical aftermaths, and lastly processing the experience and slowly healing.
In the second trajectory the topic is explored from a more external perspective rooted in history, politics, culture, and society. Through research on the history of reproductive rights and procreation, the permeating role of patriarchy from the past to the presence is addressed. The investigation of patriarchy dives into the misogynist history of witch-hunts, hysteria, capitalism, domestic labor, and into the present where reproductive rights are both improving but also continuously being tightened or removed. This trajectory further explores several socio-cultural aspects of abortion through research-based text and more sporadic and poetic writings. The topics that are addressed are shame, guilt, religion, gender roles, depiction both visually and written, the public discussion, and the perception of blood, violence, and war in relation to women and reproductive rights.
The aim of the research paper is to break down and reveal the patriarchal structures which compromise women's reproductive rights, and to state the importance of reclaiming the personal narratives as well as the autonomy over one's own body, narrative, and life.
You Don't See What I See
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Karlijn Karthaus
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Research Paper of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2024
BA Photography
Summary:
You don’t see what I see.
I don’t see what you see.
Eyes as hatches passing through reflections of the world around.
Electromagnetic radiation translated into visuals.
Interpreted by mental processes in the brain.
As a woman who used to work in the corporate world, is a mother and an aspiring photographer, I am interested in the topics of gender equality and feminism, seen as inequality based on power relations that are culturally constructed in society. Regarding these topics, I find mostly written or text-based outings. The nature of the topic results in either stereotype or cliché imagery we see in the media, that are detrimental in acquiring an equal basis for everyone. Using case studies, I analyze photographic work related to the gender inequality and power structures. The theoretical framework applied is from Nicholas Mirzoeff (British-American, 1962), Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at the New York University and is derived from his book ‘An introduction to Visual Culture’ (2023). This theory distinct ‘visualizing’ (what is commonly seen, the ruling power) and ‘visibilizing’ (introducing different perspectives as response to the ruling power). Mirzoeff elaborates on this by comparing the Spanish word for power, ‘poder’, meaning “static, constituted power” with power as ‘potencia’ which according to him has a “dynamic constituent dimension… our power to do, to be affected and to be affected by others.”. To me he connects visualization with exposing what the systemic power wants us to see, while ‘visibilizing’ is exposing the views that are not dictated by that overarching power but that have the freedom to show different perspectives and views.
For the case studies I chose ‘The Table of Power I & II’ of Dutch Photographer Jacqueline Hassink (1966-2018) analyzing economic power and role of women in the higher echelons of companies. A work consisting of board rooms photos of the forty largest industrial multinational companies at the time (1994 & 2009, Table of Power I & II respectively). In ‘Female Power Stations: Queen Bees’ (1996-1998) she reflects upon board rooms of female leadership countered against their dining tables at home, all set up to receive guests. A diptych of power (work) vs. traditional qualities (home). I continue with the work ‘Performance Review’ (2020) of American photographer Endia Beal (1985). ‘Performance Review’ is about fitting into traditional corporate culture layered with outward signifiers of difference, navigating the corporate environment based on unconscious biases.
We are part of the system, whether we like it or not. Me aiming to trigger a change with photographs is what drives me to be a maker. By not taking things as truth or fixed, by challenging the status quo, and by knowing that there are always different perspectives to look at things. I feel I am challenging the visualization of things, and therefore affect people around me. It’s me creating a ‘potencia’, a dynamic constituent dimension, that fights the ‘poder’; it’s within my power to do and my photographs will enable that.
Q&A
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
I include questions I was given at the Janine Antoni workshop, Toynbee Studios, in 2010, as feedback to my work. I address the participants by the first names they used to introduce themselves at the workshop. The questions were given in writing to each participant by the rest of the group, to offer material for thinking further their artistic practice in their own time.
I include the answers I would give now, if I was asked the same questions.
Much of Janine Antoni's work is about the female body and cultural identity.
SuperShe Islands
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Chenyan Wang
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Supershe Islands is an online dialogical art project, aimed at fostering inclusive dialogues within a community of women, allowing them to open up their own stories and thoughts to the world while exploring the extension of dialogue in the virtual platform.
Ritual Domestiko
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Rossana P. Mercado Rojas
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Ritual domestiko is an ongoing performative artistic experimentation built with the purpose of curating/curing and be cured by using feminist practices and methodologies of collective work, (self) care and the possibilities of social media. RD proposes the possibility of healing (curator-healer) between pairs by performing daily rituals materialized in the daily publication in social media addressing what happens to us in each of our contexts. RD was born from the long friendship and artistic practice shared by Angélica Chávez-Cáceres and Rossana Mercado-Rojas, a long-standing relationship and in turn look for strategies to continue supporting each other and create/find new languages to curate "heal" each other despite and in response to the current situation of geographical distance.
Diary of a Suffragette
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Marijn Brinksma
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This fictional diary is written by a fictional person and consists of factual information. The writings are set up in a chronological timeline. Our goal is to provide insight and information about the steps suffragettes had to take to fight for the right to vote.
Las guerras púdicas
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Lorena Croceri
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In this exhibition I develop the concept of responsibility linked to performance art. Through the analysis of the performative installation Las guerras púdicas, I make an approach to the curated integration of fields: cultural practice of cooking, contemporary art, psychoanalysis, synoptic charts and language of war.
A Dead Writer Exists in Words, and Language is a Type of Virus
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Linda Stupart, Jakub Jan Ceglarz
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
"Virus" synthesises four years of performative and traditional research—engaging a range of contemporary artists, institutions, and writing practices to reformulate possibilities for art criticism and institutional critique within artworlds. This practice-based research offers new possibilities for embodied art criticism. The work makes visible, interrupts, and challenges the violent and patriarchal structures of the artworld, offering new modes and practices of feminist and queer artmaking, critique, and resistance. As well as the novella, "Virus" comprises sculptural elements, videos, performance, and a series of prints of spells written for/against the artworld.
This research contributes to performance art, situating itself on the borders of ritual, language, and performativity. The spell works are at the centre of a ‘re-emergence’ of witchcraft in art, and new possibilities for performance-as-criticism. "Virus" is a singular output in multiple fields—literary criticism; experimental writing; contemporary art; eco-feminism; queer theory, and objectification studies—and its multidisciplinarity contributes to each of these fields. Its assertion as an art object, in the form of writing, is an integral moment for the conception of the ‘Art Writing’ discipline.
The spells appeared in a major survey show of feminist art touring the UK (‘Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance’, 2018–19), as well as survey shows about witchcraft and contemporary art in Vienna and Cornwall. Stupart performed spells as research outputs at the University of Melbourne; 4S: Society for Social Science annual conference, Sydney; Edinburgh University; Reading University; and as an exemplary of practice-based research in the BCU PGCert lecture program.
"Virus" is the subject of two conference papers: Ass. Prof. Helen Hester (‘Towards a Theory of Thing-Women’, 2017) and Dr Holly Pester (‘Common Rest’ 2016). It is on university reading lists including: Royal Academy of Art, Copenhagen; Reading University; University of Cape Town; Queen Mary and Goldsmiths, London University; and LCC.
Ixodos: Writing with the ball-point of the clitoris: Why infantophobia is essential to the system: Why artist mothers are especially dangerous
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Chrystalleni Loizidou, Someone has to do this
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
We hereby begin to frame the internationally collaborative work of Ixodos to be reviewed, and propagated by the Research Catalogue and its affiliate institutions.
This exposition is based on questions initially asked by/with artist Livia Moura, Carolina Cortes, Bianca Berdardo, for Instituto Mesa.
Ixodos is an international platform for transversal-translocal art exchanges, facilitating and accompanying residencies, projects, exhibitions, the sharing of knowledge, and the building of our common soul and greater selves.
These art exchanges are not just between artists and art institutions but also between social, political and ecological projects and movements around the world, starting from Cyprus and Brazil. Ixodos was ritually initiated In June-August 2018 by Carolina Cortes, Chrystalleni Loizidou, Evanthia Tselika, and Livia Moura in Greece and Cyprus, initially in connection with Hippocrates' Garden in the island of Cos, It generated its second residency programme at A Casa Lar, Rio de Janeiro, in June-August 2019.
Ixodos é uma plataforma de intercâmbios, trocas, facilitando e acompanhando residencias, projetos, exposições, o compartilhamento de conhecimento, e a construção e expansão de uma alma comum e de nossas existências.
Esta troca artística não é apenas entre artistas e instituições artísticas, mas também de projetos e movimentos sociais, políticos e ecológicos (ambientais) no mundo, começando com Chipre e Brasil.