HÉLÈNE AMOUZOU, SELF-PORTRAITS 1/2
Amouzou thus began photographing herself in the attic with a 35 mm canon camera -and later a Rolleicord - as her lone witness. Not long after, however, she realized that extended exposure times and low-sensitivity films would allow her to move and portray herself without being recognized. Amouzou’s figure appears in motion, traveling through the frame as a fleeting figure…
MARTHA WILSON, I MAKE UP THE IMAGE OF MY PERFECTION/I MAKE UP THE IMAGE OF MY DEFORMITY, 1974/2008
Martha Wilson "I Make Up the Image of My Perfection/I Make Up The Image of My Deformity". A real pioneer in using performance as an artistic medium in itself, Martha Wilson stages her body, and as an actress would do, grinds and transforms herself, creating multiple self-portraits becoming subversive characters…
HE CHENGYAO, TESTIMONY, 2001–2002
The photograph presented in the exhibition is one of three works from the series "Testimony", presenting portraits of the artist, her mother and son. Large-format photographs, maintained in a similar style, bring to mind classical Baroque painting: brightly lit figures shown against a uniformly dark background…
ANNA GAJEWSZKY, IN THE SEARCH FOR VENUS, 2021
The series In the search for Venus depicts an intimate examination of my femininity, my body and its comparison to ancient portrayals of Venus. I was 18 years old when I was told by several doctors I had fertility issues, and that becoming pregnant would be difficult for me…
MATILDA YUEYANG PENG, SPECIAL MATERIALS
People made of special materials” is a phrase commonly used to promote the realization of self-fulfillment and self-sacrifice in the communist context. Revolving around the effect of the Chinese Cultural Revolution on my family history, this project is a visualization of a “monologue” constantly going on between all times, people, and materials, especially the single-sided conversation that is speaking to and influencing generations of continual products of historical events...
DONNA GOTTSCHALK, IMAGES FROM “BRAVE, BEAUTIFUL OUTLAWS”
Donna Gottschalk, a photographer active in the early period of radical lesbian organizing in New York and California during the 1970s. Gottschalk came out as a lesbian right at the formation of the radical lesbians and Furies collectives on the east coast, where she met lesbian artists JEB (Joan E. Biren), Flavia Rando, and others, and later moved to California to join lesbian-separatist communities…
SHELLY SILVER, WHAT I'M LOOKING FOR, 2004,
A woman sets out to photograph moments of intimacy. On an Internet dating site she writes: 'I'm looking for people who would like to be photographed in public revealing something of themselves...
SABELO MLANGENI, COUNTRY GIRLS, 2003-2009
Glamour and grittiness combine in Sabelo Mlangeni's Country Girls series, an intimate portrait of gay life in the countryside. Mlangeni took the photographs in small towns and rural areas in the Mpumalanga province. Driefontein, Ermelo, Bethal, Piet Retief, Standerton and Sekunda - nodes of mining, agriculture, forestry, and coal-fed power stations….
OLIVIA ARTHUR, MURMURINGS OF THE SKIN
For the past few years I have been making work about the relationship that we have to our bodies as humans. The work grew out of a fascination I developed after being pregnant and feeling my body as a machine performing an incredible task. I went on to explore intimacy, touch, physical connection, stability and the ways we use technology to enhance all those things…
METTE INGVARTSEN, 21 PORNOGRAPHIES, 2017
Writing a novel about libertinage from his prison cell in 1785, Marquis de Sade declared that the nature of human passions authorizes crime. This moment in Western modernity marks the moral ambivalence in the bind between sexual liberation and power…
LINDER, SELECT COLLAGES, 1976-1979
Linder has worked with the pornographic image for four decades, often montaging the images from pornographic magazines with those that she finds in interior design and fashion publications, the common denominator in all three being the depiction of the female body…
JOE SPENCE AND ROSY MARTIN, LIBIDO UPRISING PART I AND PART II, 1989
In their collaborative series Libido Uprising, Spence and Martin examine the relationship between mother and daughter. The work focuses on Jo’s vision of a 1950s working class, domesticated housewife, seen from the eyes of a young woman in the 1980s who is exploring her sexual freedom…
SPANDITA MALIK, JĀḶĪ—MESHES OF RESISTANCE
The artist expands upon her photographic series Nā́rī, a project that she began as a graduate student at Parsons School of Design in 2019. For Nā́rī, she traveled to small communities in India known for their distinct embroidery styles and places where women learn handicraft to gain financial independence…
VAGINAL DAVIS, THE WHITE TO BE ANGRY, 1999
Vaginal Davis’s touchstone work, The White to be Angry, challenges white supremacy culture in the United States through irony and pastiche. Davis is a key figure in the history of queer music, performance, and video art, whose work bridged the queer performance and punk club scenes of Los Angeles in the late 1970s…
SHIRIN NESHAT, THE FURY
The Fury, comprising a double-channel video installation and a series of black and white photographs. Shot in June 2022, The Fury seeks to capture the Zeitgeist: a sense of foreboding and dread sparked by the resurgence of fascism that we are witnessing…
NONA FAUSTINE, MY COUNTRY
In “My Country,” Faustine confronts and interrogates iconic American monuments, such as the Lincoln Memorial and the Statue of Liberty, using her camera to reframe conventional, colonialist perspectives, and reinserting some of the truth and trauma behind these memorialized spaces…
MICHÈLE PEARSON CLARKE, SUCK TEETH COMPOSITIONS, 2018
This three-channel video and sound installation presents a choral symphony structured around the everyday Caribbean oral gesture of sucking teeth. Referred to variously as kiss teeth, steups, chups, and stchoops, to suck teeth is to produce a sound by sucking in air through the teeth, while pressing the tongue against the upper or lower teeth, with the lips pursed or slightly flattened…
LEROY JOHNSON, HOUSE SCULPTURES
A collection of the artist’s house sculptures made “with a documentarian’s eye but a poet’s gaze,” says a gallery statement. His pieces capture a city in transition, peering into its past to underscore the myriad experiences of its present…
LAURA ANDERSON BARBATA, INTERVENTION: WALL STREET, 2011
Intervention: Wall Street was conceived as a response to the dire economic crisis that became most evident in 2008 which today afflicts not only Americans but has impacted 99% of the global population…
KHADIJA SAYE, DWELLING: IN THIS SPACE WE BREATHE
The series was created out of the artist’s personal need for spiritual grounding after experiencing trauma. This work is based on the search for what gives meaning to our lives and what we hold onto in times of despair and life changing challenges. We exist in the marriage of physical and spiritual remembrance...