Oh Boy, It’s a Girl! A short history of artists’ books made by female artists
EXHIBITION:
Oh Boy, It’s a Girl! A short history of artists’ books made by female artists
PERIOD:
6 June – 20 July 2024
With a title inspired by the iconic museum exhibition Oh boy, it’s a girl! Feminismen in der Kunst organized by Hedwig Saxenhuber and Astrid Wege at the Kunstverein München in 1994 – a milestone in the transdisciplinary approaches on this topic – the current exhibition offers a polyphonic view of the gender issue through the transgressive practice of some women artists who have worked – some occasionally, others mainly – with printed matter: Hanne Darboven, Sophie Calle, Marianne Wex, Nancy Spero, Carmen Winant, Mariken Wessels, Anne Collier, Louise Bourgeois, Annette Messager, Francesca Woodman, Justine Kurland, Katrien de Blauwer, and Mirella Bentivoglio, among others.

Their diversified narratives punctuate the history of postmodern artists’ books while tracing the upheavals and the turning points related to corporeal identity, thus shifting from the most poetic to the most political. Inspired by this performative activation of the female body – often used as a strategy against the prevailing patriarchal power structures – the exhibition is completed by an appropriation work by Tiane Doan na Champassak who reifies and “museifies” three street collages by the feminist collective Féminicides (active in Paris since 2019) as well as by a selection of video excerpts from the early career of choreographer and performance artist Nancy Spanier, whose practice anticipated to a large extent many attitudes and themes reiterated in the genre discussion in the last decades, such as embodiment, existence, sexuality, intimacy and the politics of the body.

Curator, Larisa Oancea