IF I COULD WISH FOR SOMETHING
If I could wish for something takes its title from a Friedrich Holländer’s Weimar song. The lyrics of “Wenn ich mir was wünschen dürfte” are sung from the perspective of a woman who seeks to be happy, but not too happy, because sadness has become a refuge for her. This feeling is typical of the fraught ‘love story’ between feminism and socialism, between love and revolution. “The woman question” has been tiptoed around by every revolutionary movement since the nineteenth century. These decades of disillusionment are part and parcel of feminist history.
This exhibition brings together two recent films by Dora Garcia, Love With Obstacles and If I Could Wish For Something. Both films are part of Amor Rojo, a work-in-progress that studies the complex legacy of Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952). Alexandra Kollontai was a Marxist theoretician and figure of the October Revolution, a defender of the rights of women and sexual activist. Her insights seemed written for a future world and are more relevant today than ever. As far back as the 1920s, she was already addressing issues such as women’s unpaid domestic labour, the combination of work and childcare, discrimination against women in the labour market, sexual freedom, abortion rights, and the value of affection and relationships in terms of supply and demand. Concepts coined by Kollontai such as “the younger sister” (introducing the question of class in feminism) and “comradely love” (the idea that love is not a private, but a political matter) sound very strong today in intersectional and Third World feminisms.
The eponymous publication If I Could Wish for Something will be released to coincide with the exhibition. This publication brings together a group of authors with different areas of expertise who together outline the central topic: the unfulfillment of the promise revolution made to women. The book contains contributions from: Antonio Cataldo, Saddie Choua, Paloma Contreras Lomas, Dora García, Agnieszka Gratza, Carla Lamoyi, Hilde Methi, Andrea Valdés, Sayak Valencia and Pieternel Vermoortel.
The eponymous publication If I Could Wish for Something will be released to coincide with the exhibition. This publication brings together a group of authors with different areas of expertise who together outline the central topic: the unfulfillment of the promise revolution made to women. The book contains contributions from: Antonio Cataldo, Saddie Choua, Paloma Contreras Lomas, Dora García, Agnieszka Gratza, Carla Lamoyi, Hilde Methi, Andrea Valdés, Sayak Valencia and Pieternel Vermoortel.
Dora García is an artist, educator and researcher working with interactivity and performance, using exhibitions as a platform to investigate relationships between artwork, audience and place. She has participated in numerous international art exhibitions, including Münster Sculpture Projects (2007), Venice Biennale (2011, 2013, 2015), Sydney Biennale (2008), São Paulo Biennale (2010), dOCUMENTA 13 (2012) and Gwangju Biennale (2016). Recently, she participated in the Oslo Biennial (as part of the collective Rose Hammer), Art Encounters Timisoara (Romania) and AICHI Triennale, Japan. García lives in Oslo.
Netwerk Aalst is an open house, an international center for contemporary art and an independent cinema in Aalst, Belgium. The exhibition If I Could Wish for Something is part of ‘The Astronaut Metaphor’, an ongoing and evolving program about politics, aesthetics and the human. What position and role can artists, writers, thinkers and institutions and their responsive practices take in a complex public sphere? With this program, developed as a series of long-term commissions, Netwerk Aalst wants to understand what an integrated support for artists might imply, how we can rethink the institution that diverges from the needs and desires of artistic practices that hold Aalst here and now as a compass. Netwerk Aalst is supported by Flanders State of the Art, Flanders Audiovisual Fund and the City of Aalst.
The exhibition is curated by Antonio Cataldo (Artistic Director of Fotogalleriet), Piet Mertens (Curator, Netwerk Aalst) and Pieternel Vermoortel (Artistic Director, Netwerk Aalst)
The exhibition If I Could Wish for Something has been realised in a collaboration between Fotogalleriet Oslo and Netwerk Aalst and can be seen at both locations. The exhibition at Fotogalleriet Oslo runs from 03/09/21 to 17/10/21. And at Netwerk Aalst from 11/09/21 to 19/12/21.
