The history of feminist video art cannot be reduced to the acknowledgment of the system which served to marginalize and exclude artists based on their gender and sexuality. This system constitutes a constellation of powers which categorize, hierarchize, and render irrelevant a broad spectrum of cultural elements: the narratives which inspire the works, aesthetic forms of expression and artistic mediums, language, affective entanglements. Such overarching concepts as canon and art history traditionally masquerade as neutral while, in fact, they can engender and justify exclusion.
The project Imagined Community VIII: My Significant Others presents women artists who enter into a dialog with the feminist cultural heritage by re-constructing forgotten and erased narratives and deconstructing patriarchal mythologies. The curators Markéta Jonásová and Ulrike Gerhardt undertake the task of challenging the mythologies which support and invigorate the hierarchical structures of art history which lead to systematic marginalization and exclusion of female artists. The presented female artists introduce their feminist forerunners as their inspirational predecessors. The chapter is no attempt to write a linear herstory because it is precisely the system based on objectivity and rationality which rendered female artists an aberration. Rather, it is a testimony of the multiplicity of forms of affective connections which cut through geopolitical or chronological delineations. By doing so, the curators not only provide female historical figures with a belated recognition, but also address the forms of exclusion of artistic, activist, and dissonant articulations and practices of women from the art historical canon in order to simultaneously (re-)inscribe the names of these women in it.
The video work Alliances (2018) by Alex Martinis Roe traces the invisible heritage of feminist forebears in the city of Paris. By speaking with committed feminists and activists, Martinis Roe suggests a more nuanced picture of 1968 and the women’s liberation movement. In Bent Tiles (2017), artist Alžběta Bačíková tells the story of the unrecognized Czech ceramicist Jarmila B. in the setting of an abandoned spa hotel. With her radical ideas and habitus, she was ahead of her times, led an incognito life of a rebel. Masha Godovannaya’s video work Only two words (2018) introduces the two poems Holes and Bone by the American poet Eileen Myles and transpositions them into a queer visual essay with images of St. Petersburg, Russia, and New York, USA. Lea Petříková’s video work After the Magician (2020) explores themes of invisibility, magic and dreams, drawing on the unfinished film Le Magicien (1947) by the underrated surrealist artist Alice Rahon. Ieva Balode’s sci-fi inspired work Commission (2020) follows the journey of a mythical matriarchal book between the past and present.
The program is a collaboration between etc. gallery, the online platform D’EST, and the Národní filmovy archiv, Prague, and it was supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.
production: Anna Davidová, Tomáš Kajánek
IT support: Tatiana Bogacheva, Ondřej Roztočil
graphic design: Nela Klímová
translations: Věra Kloudová, Lenka Marie Čapková, Bob Hýsek
special thanks to: Jakub Jirka, Michal Jurza, Tatiana Bogacheva
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The audiovisual works of the eigth chapter “Obscene West and Flickering Love Bites” give us glimpses of the feminist video and performance art in the early post-socialist period. The capitalist mode of (artistic) production and the inclusion of the Eastern European countries in the global economy are the material background of the works which use the themes of femininity, gendered relations, sexuality, sexual perversion, and violence to articulate a critical reflection on the complex ramifications of the post-socialist condition in art and broader society.
→ See the screening dates in the Program
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“Imagined Community VIII: My Significant Others” stirs up cultural narratives that have been excluding significant herstories. Five audiovisual works by female artists present feminist forebears as well as undiscovered inspirational female figures, who struggle to become part of the official artistic and political history. Women artists enter into a dialog with overlooked or fictitious personalities from the cultural field and thereby touch upon cultural narratives that frame HerStories worth re-telling.
→ See the screening dates in the Program
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ONLINE: Screening Chapter #6 1/2
Signals From Roots To Leaves: A post-botanical assembly
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Curated by
- Suza Husse
“Signals From Roots To Leaves” approaches the Botanical Garden in Olomouc as a site where post-socialist and post-colonial ecologies and cultures intersect. Here, Agave, Ceiba, Rubber tree, Reeds and Carnation who live in the palm house, the subtropical greenhouse and under the open sky in Olomouc are convened together with a group of artists and healers whose work and knowledge resonates with specific trans*species connections and ecological histories they carry.→ See the screening dates in the Program
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The screening chapter “ReTopia” acknowledges “post-socialism” not only as a continental but also as a global phenomenon, though with palpable regional specificity and intensity. It looks at transitional shifts and modes of remembrance of historical processes that evoke forms – rejected, outmoded, disposed from power, gender political, architectural, and even full of potential. Without being afraid of utopian ideology, it looks back and forth and sideways in search of radically different futures.
→ See the screening dates in the Program
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Entwining autobiographical, historical, and fictional narratives, this screening program examines generational, personal, and political frictions, breaks and entanglements, taking place in the dystopian context of post-1989. The tension bears down on the sphere of the personal and the political maintained through the relationship of the four figures: the figure of Neighbor, the figure of Mother, the figure of Lover and the figure of Other.
→ See the screening dates in the Program
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The chapter examines the body as a collective, as a singular entity, as a social choreography of an alliance of states, as an organless, cognitive-capitalist, cerebral network, as a corporeal reading instrument of past, former socialist indices, as a place of textual and discursive inscription, but also as a genuine place of affective encounters and material practices. The curators focus on video works and films that flare up the affective, somaesthetic, relational and transformative potentials of the body after 1989 / 1991.
→ See the screening dates in the Program
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Cosmos Cosmetics: Unresting Memoryscapes and Corpofictions
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Curated by
- Miona Bogović ,
- Suza Husse ,
- Suzana Milevska
Political protocol tends to dispossess, overwrite, and refurbish unwanted narratives. Parallel to this, there are new agencies that enhance the intersections, reciprocities, and movements between bodies, spaces, objects, and memories. The video art and experimental film works of COSMOS COSMETICS: Unresting Memoryscapes and Corpofictions are concerned with architectural, corporeal, and phantasmatic materializations of internalized mnemonic, and bio-political regimes. Meanwhile they address surface porosities and subcutaneous layers of post-socialist cities. Hence this chapter of screenings in D’EST brings together artistic strategies and methods for unsettling, decontaminating, and queering artificial mono-histories, which stem from the urge to untag and distance the subject from the constraints of conformity, imposed belonging to a certain ethnic group or community, and identitarian politics in general.→ See the screening dates in the Program
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Performing Words, Uttering Performance
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Curated by
- Inga Lāce ,
- Anna Bitkina ,
- Maria Veits ,
- TOK (The Creative Association of Curators)
The changing role and function of language before and after the “transition” cannot be discussed without considering the dimension of authoritarian speech acts in the last phase of socialism. Anthropologist Alexei Yurchak shares the observation that during the authoritarian speech act, sign and reference, language and gesture, word and action merge into each other. This thesis is the foundation for an understanding of the variety of linguistic and performative experiments in post-socialist video art. The curators will focus on video works that reflect upon shifts in language and meaning and employ diverse silent, verbal, performative, activist, and other strategies to discuss collective and personal memory, identity, power relations, gender roles, and socio-political change.→ See the screening dates in the Program
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The Suspension and Excess of Time
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Curated by
- Kathrin Becker ,
- Jana Seehusen
The curatorial selection The Suspension and Excess of Time explores the role of time within a period of radical political, social, and economical change. The selected video works focus on the changes different societies were going through during the Perestroika era, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the soviet empire. Paying tribute to speculative temporalities, curators Becker and Seehusen will trace people’s everyday experiences in the former “East” and “West” before and after 1989 / 1991.→ See the screening dates in the Program
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In 1957, Roland Barthes stated that in “Western” mythology the USSR would be a world halfway between the Earth and Mars to exemplify that the communist world was considered as foreign as another planet. Similar to Barthes’ literary method in his Mythologies book, curator, filmmaker and artist Xandra Popescu scripted three semi-fictional short stories to introduce major paradigms of her screening program O’ Mystical East and West.
→ See the screening dates in the Program