WOMEN IN THREE ACTS

Multiple Artists
EXHIBITION From 14.03.2019 To 04.10.2019
photo by Julie Hrncirova

Women’s stories are becoming increasingly visible within the arts, and within society as a whole. Besides this alleged recognition in terms of equality, our world is still largely dominated by men, while the struggle for power and influence is exposing and subjecting socially marginalised communities to constant discrimination.


Through a wide range of artistic practices and incorporating the work of practitioners from around the world, Women in Three Acts asks if a female perspective would disturb this dominant view and create a different response to relations and subjects. Photography is a large part of forming and imaging this discussion, and it has been used at different points in time to question or assert these prevailing categories. Within the three acts ranging from larger anonymous groups, to smaller communities to individual stories, the artists within the exhibition explore and express the complexity of human relationships.


Women in Three Acts unravels a wide range of expressions, building upon the work of Lilla Szász, whose practice is rooted in documentary photography. She has come to be known for her socially inspired works exploring the lives of closed communities all over the world. The reoccurring themes of human vulnerability and the prompting of female views in Szász’s work reverberate in larger contexts and intersect with the participatory experiences of Gluklya & Tsaplya, the memories drawn by Anastasia Khoroshilova‘s photo-essays, the fragmentary reconstructions of Maya Schweizer, the histories of belonging of Ditte Lyngkær Pedersen, and the «unorthodox» family portraits of Paz Errázuriz.


Performance artist Marthe Ramm Fortun has been invited to contextualise and challenge the discursive absence of female photographers in the founding years of Fotogalleriet. In a series of newly developed, site-specific performances, she will address the lineage of Scandinavian contemporary art photography, acknowledging Fotogalleriet’s archives as a pioneering space for the medium in Northern Europe. As such, her work will reveal historical vulnerabilities of female positions and gaps in inclusion.


Women in Three Acts aims to foretell alternative stories of marginalised communities in the Western world and beyond during the last forty years, with a female gaze. Through different series of works, produced by women artists from different countries and generations, this exhibition is not trying to draw a definitive story, but rather to offer a platform for non-standardised narratives that are often overlooked when structuring an understanding of the world today.


Paz Errázuriz (b. 1944, Santiago) began her career as an autodidact during Pinochet’s dictatorship in the 1970s. As co-founder of the Independent Photographers Association (AFI), she used black and white portraits to denounce the dictator as well as the social dictates which condemned individuals and groups to a marginal existence that rendered them invisible. Errázuriz represented Chile at the Venice Biennial in 2015, and has had solo exhibitions at institutions like the Barbican Centre in London (2018), the Museo de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), and the International Centre of Photography (ICP) in New York (2014). Her work has been acquired to several important collections, including MoMA, Tate and the Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts, and she has been the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (1986), The Photo España Award (2015), and the National Prize for Plastic Arts in Chile (2017).


Gluklya (Natialia Pershina-Yakimanskaya) (b. 1969, Leningrad) lives and works in St. Petersburg and Amsterdam. Gluklya and Tsaplya (Olga Egorova) co-founded the artists’ collective Factory Found Clothes (FFC) in 1996. The artists use art and social research to explore concepts of gender and fragility through participatory experiences, installation, performance, video and text. Since 2003, Gluklya has been an active member of the group Chto Delat (What is to be done). She often uses clothing as a tool to build connections between art and everyday life, and has contributed to the Critical Mass Festival, and the public programme of Manifesta 10, and the exhibition All the World’s Future, curated by Okui Enwezor, during the Venice Biennal in 2015. She has also shown her work at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, Arnhem (2014); Hermitage Museum, Amsterdam (2013), MUMOK, Vienna (2012), and the National Centre of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2006).


Marthe Ramm Fortun (b. 1978, Oslo) is based in Oslo and currently assistant professor at Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts. Departing from site-specific texts, Fortun’s performances use body, language and elusive sculptural boundaries to inscribe closed off institutional spaces with persistent and poetic feminisms. Since completing her studies at the New York University in 2008, Fortun has shown work in a variety of institutions and contexts throughout Norway and abroad, including BOZAR and Gladstone Gallery, Brussels, The Munch Museum, UKS, Kunsthall Oslo, Kunstnernes Hus, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Bærum, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Sculpture Center and Performa, New York, and KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin.


Anastasia Khoroshilova (b. 1978, Moscow) is an artist and photographer, born in Moscow 1978, who currently works and lives in Berlin. Khoroshilova studied photography at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany. Her subsequent work has been shown in numerous exhibitions worldwide, including the solo shows at Haus der Berliner Festspiele (2017), Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris (2014), Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel (2012), Venice Biennale (Collateral Event, 2011), and Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2009). She has also been a lecturer at the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia. In 2016 she became a member of Deutsche Fotografische Akademie (the German Academy of Photography).


Ditte Lyngkær Pedersen (b. 1977, Århus) lives and works in Århus, Denmark. She holds an MFA in Visual Art from Malmö Art Academy, Sweden, 2004. Through a range of media, such as video, text, photography, drawing and object-based installations, Lyngkær Pedersen examines the various ways in which we understand our identity and make sense of our surroundings. Her practice often revisits themes from science and theories of perception. She has taken part in several international residency programmes and exhibitions, which among others include Flux Factory, New York (2012), Berlinaut, Berlin (2008), The Presence of Absence at Moesgaard Museum, Denmark (2017), Synthesia 4 – Translating, Correcting Archiving at Art Laboratory Berlin, and The Crow – Osan Media Art Adventure at Cultural Factory Osan, South-Korea. She has furthermore been engaged in a number of long-term collectives and curatorial projects, including The Production Unit, HOMEWORK and the exhibition space rum46 in Århus.


Maya Schweizer (b. 1976, Paris) studied art and art history at the University of Aix-en-Provence, before she moved to Germany to continue her education at the School of Visual Arts in Leipzig and the Berlin University of Arts. Her work has been awarded and shown in numerous exhibitions worldwide, which among others include solo shows such as Die Luke, ein Fliege und dort die Puschkinallee at Kunstverein Leipzig; Art | Memory | Place at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2016), and The wizard chooses nine of them at TCG Nordica in Kunming, China (2013) and group shows at the Anren Biennale in China (2017), Musée d’Art Contemporain, Châteauneuf-le-Rouge, France (2017), Kunsthaus Hamburg (2015), and Wallace Gallery, New York (2011).


Lilla Szász (b. 1977, Budapest) lives and works in Budapest, Hungary, and Lisbon, Portugal. She obtained a MA in Aesthetics, Russian language and literature at the University of ELTE, Budapest in 2000. After graduating, Szász has been working as an art photographer and photo journalist, as well as teaching in Budapest and New York. She has had several solo shows in Hungary, as well as participated in group exhibitions as We Will Not Change Our Show at Dum umeni mesta Arna in Brno, Czech Republic (2019), The Way We See. An Overview of Hungarian Photography at the National Museum in Warsaw, Poland (2017), and #moskvater – The history of Széll Kálman tér at the Kiscelli Museum in Budapest (2016). In 2012, her work was exhibited the company of Richard Avedon, Richard Billingham and Paz Errázuriz in the exhibition Aqui Estamon (Here we are), curated by Gerardo Mosquera and Monica Portillo, receiving 640.000 visitors and winning the public’ prize at Photo España.

Kati Simon is an independent curator based in Berlin. She has worked in various institutions in Hungary, Austria and Germany, and organised numerous gallery and museum exhibitions and art projects of contemporary art. Her curatorial work has included solo and thematic exhibitions, many of which critically addressed a variety of social issues. Recently, she has been working extensively with internationally acclaimed artist Armin Linke. She is co-author of Die Insel (2017), a video work realised in collaboration with artist Zsolt Vásárhelyi. She is a member of IKT – International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art, senior member of the Studio of

Started in a basement in 1977 by renowned artists Dag Alveng and Tom Sandberg, together with Bjørn Høyum, as the first fotohalle for hothousing cutting edge photographic practices in Scandinavia, Fotogalleriet has since then been dedicated to exhibiting local and international lens-based art practices, and analysing the rapidly expanding nature of a field unrestricted by technological and aesthetic shifts. Through its commitment to research and engagement with artists, Fotogalleriet is a leading institution within the field of image making.

Iterations of the exhibition Women in Three Acts have been presented at FOTOHOF in Salzburg, Austria, and Gallery INDA in Budapest. Fotogalleriet is grateful for its continued support from The Arts Council Norway, as well as the Norwegian Photographic Fund (Nofofo) and Oslo Municipality. It is also indebted to The Royal Norwegian Ministry of Culture for their exhibition honorarium pilot programme.

 

photo by Julie Hrncirova
photo by Julie Hrncirova
photo by Julie Hrncirova
photo by Julie Hrncirova
photo by Julie Hrncirova