2020 – Utopia de una Transformación
Utopia de una Transformación
Travelexhibition
Humanism, Human Rights and Gender Violence
Curator Luciana Esqueda
Co-Curator Denise Parizek
Artist Vienna
Guadalupe Aldrete Drawings / Performance ° Paula Flores Installation ° Bojana Fuzinato-Stamenkovic Weaving Installation ° Vera Klimentyeva Icons ° Isidora Krstic Video Installation °
Jelena Micic Light Sculpture
Artists Mexico
Beatriz Canfield Vídeo ° Blanca Villeda Text ° Claudia Esqueda Image ° Claudia Pérez Pavón Image ° Jackie Cambell Investigation ° Jacky Muniello Photo ° Katia Esperanza Tirado Vídeo
Laura Rios Vídeo ° Lucila Flores Vídeo ° Lily Dabdoub Investigation ° Maribel Portela Image ° Marieta Bracho Image ° Patricia Soriano Image ° Sandra G Hordoñez Vídeo ° Selma Guisande Vídeo
Tulia Berdejo VídeovXóchitl Rivera Vídeo
Side Show
Lectures, Talks, Workshops, Screening Manifesto Magazin
Vernissage / Presentation of Manifesto Magazin and performance by Gabriele Luciani 4. December 2020 19 Uhr
Movie Screening 10.December, 2020 19 Uhr
Josepha Blanchet ° Lisa Birke ° Luciana Esqueda ° Tina Kult ° Denise Schellmann, ° Borjana Ventzislavova
Duration 05.12. – 30.12.2020
24/7 Art Window
Lasst uns bitte respektvoll sein und einander schützen, indem wir Masken tragen und Abstand halten, um Anmeldung wird gebeten: gallery@12-14.org
Please let us be respectful and protect each other by wearing masks and keeping physical distance, registration is requested: gallery@12-14.org
SIN TITULO / GUADALUPE ALDRETE
Performance & Drawing
“Sin título”, untitled in Spanish, is the title of this performance series. While saying untitled I actually refer to non-nameable, without form, taste or smell… exactly the qualities of coal after being processed, and for me exactly as difficult to mention or describe as the social and emotional factors I’m referring to.
On the social level I relate coal to the complicate processes for its extraction and the difficult work, in some countries under inhuman conditions, that this represent for the workers. For me coal is a reference to hard work, men kind and industry, their relation, coexistence and dependence. In these performances I reflect as well on the chemical character of the coal (activated carbon) as a neutralizing material filtering the negative or unnecessary elements, letting through what is still usable.
“Ohne Titel” ist der Titel einer Performance Serie. Eigentlich bevorzuge ich eher nicht nennbar, ohne Form, geschmack oder Geruch, genau das sind die Qualitäten von Kohle. Ebenso schwierig wie diese Materie, ist für mich den Subtext über soziale und emotionale Faktoren, die mein Leben beeinflussen, zu beschreiben. Auf der sozialen Ebene ist der Ansatz an der unwürdigen Gewinnung der Kohle – daher ist für mich Kohle eine referenz für harte, Menschen unwürdige Arbeit und Industrie, die die Umwelt verpestet. Aber Kohle kann auch als Filter benutzt werden, um Wasser zu reinigen. Das ist mein Ansatz – das Filtern von negativer Energie, unwichtigen Beeinflussungen, Reinigung.
MIRRIRS AND TRANSLATIONS / PAULA FLORES
An installation consisting of a diversity of organic and non organic materials. Reflecting an interpretation of the lifestyle that we have in cities. Nature, life keeps happening in walls, cracks, holes and all spaces available and even non available where life grows on top of other life. How do we see ourselves, the humans, in those micro habitats? How do the micro inhabitants see and feel in our macro habitat? A habitat that a lot of the time doesn’t allow their full life span. How have we all that inhabit the brick and mortar sediments adjust, re interpret and translate life within life.
DA, PAPA / VERA KLIMENTYEVA
Violence in Family / Political and religious responsibility
Painting & Ceramics
The three pillars of every person and every society are politics, religion and sex. Russian artist Vera Klimentyeva formed a fourth, the pillar of art. A key task of art, especially in politically charged times like this, is a creative reflection of current events. Politics, religion, sex.
Each of these pillars is an indicator of the openness of a society.
The freedom with which art can and should deal with these questions is the ultimate mirror of a state.
Die drei Säule jeder Person, jeder Gesellschaft sind Politik, Religion und Sex. Die Russische Künstlerin Vera Klimentyeva kreiert eine vierte Säule, der Kunst. Eine Schlüsselaufgabe der Kunst ist die kreative Reflexion der gesellschaftspolitischen Geschehnisse, besonders heute. Politik, religion und Sex, jeder Bereich ist ein Indikator für die Offenheit und den zustand einer Gesellschaft. Die Freiheit der Kunst verlangt eine verantwortungsvolle Überprüfung und dem Ist Zustand einen Spiegel vorhalten.
NOTES ON TRAUMA / ISIDORA KRSTIC
Looped video, 4’49″, digital collage / 2018
Sound on the video: “Sniper” by Pieter Gabriel *aka SLEEP SLEEP
In 2014, the fifteenth anniversary of the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia made me want to revisit my memories of the event which I had experienced as a twelve year old child in Belgrade. In 1999, throughout the period of about three months, the city as well as other towns and locations in the country were extensively bombed. I tried to reckon with my memories or any emotions related to the bombing, which I found were quite numbed in relation to the objective horror of the event itself. I went on to search for any visual footage of the bombing which would be available online, to see what kind of reactions these would illicit.
2014, 15 Jahre nach der Nato Bombadierung in Jugoslawien wollte ich meine Erinnerungen überprüfen. Die Erinnerung an ein Ereignis als ich ein 12 jähriges Kind in Belgrad war. 1999 wurde belgrad wie viele andere Städte des Landes massiv gebombt. Die Bombenangriffen zu überdenken, die ich in Bezug auf den objektiven Horror des Ereignisses selbst als ziemlich betäubt empfand. Ich fuhr fort, nach visuellen Aufnahmen der Bombenangriffe zu suchen, die online verfügbar sein würden, um zu sehen, welche Art von Reaktionen diese illegal machen würden.
ВАВООЉАВЉВ / JELENA MICIC
ВАВООЉАВЉВ is an appropriation of the participants’ correspondence and exchange of opinions on (reshaped) graffiti. The communication is crossed out in a way that ensures that passers-by are still able to read the initial message (Serbian: православље, English: orthodoxy).
Bei ВАВООЉАВЉВ ist der künstlerische Ansatz die Korrespondenz und der Meinungsaustauschs von Menschen, die sich damit gesellschaftlich positionieren. Die Veränderung durch Streichungen wirkt so, dass Passant_innen die ursprüngliche Botschaft noch lesen können (serbisch: православље, deutsch: Orthodoxie).
VIRGINAZ / BOJANA STAMENKOVIC – FUZINATO
THE OTHER / GABRIEL VIRGILIO LUCIANI
Kick Off Womens Day 6.3.2020
UNAM Mexico City 11:30 Registro
Filmnight Artist
Josepha Blanchet, Lisa Birke, Beatriz Canfield, Luciana Esqueda, Katia Esperanza, Selma Guisande, Tina Kult, Laura Rios, Tabitha Dattinger & Astrid Sodomka, Borjana Ventzislavova
Your own four walls are and remain the most dangerous place for women.
2019 was a questionable year in Austria regarding violence against women. 20 women have been murdered during the year, mostly by partners or relatives.
Politicians and the media used this sad development to fuel the mood against migrants. Although the population should know better, the masses overtook this public opinion without thinking twice.
There have been cases in the past, the best-known being the Kampusch case and the Fritzl case, where Austrian men held and tortured children and women.
But isn’t it about the tragic fact that violence is done to women in the 21st century in the first world? Regardless of nationality, origin.
With the Women Today project, curator and artist Luciana Esqueda is launching a global outcry against violence per se and especially against violence against women.
From a Mexican perspective, murdered, abducted, disappeared women are an everyday problem. But why did we get so far that this topic has become so relevant even in our society? As a co-curator from Vienna, I chose special film positions addressing a wide range of related topics for encouraging to think it over from different points of view. The five selected positions start from different perspectives on topics that are generally important for women. The techniques and expressions are very different, though all contain humor or an irony despite the tragic reality.
The French artist Josepha Blanchet shows a beauty sleeping on the meadow / pasture from sunrise to sunset. The hustle and bustle takes place in the background, unaffected by the activity of the farmers, cows, butterflies, flies lurching in the high grass. Time passes almost unnoticed in the background. A relaxation for mind and eyes, a counterpoint to the flooding of images through social media and news. It is a very poetic movie, connected with fairy tales and myths, differentiated from today’s madness.
Lisa Birke ironizises the traditional description of women as kind of maintainers, cleaning woman or delivery machines. Female identification about the importance of ovaries is counter-caricatured. In Bombshell, Birke is the opposite, a heroine who avenges and blasts through smoke, fire and fog. Superwoman. In general, she plays in her films with tradition and clichés of gender roles.
In her animated film Tina Kult explores socialization of children, especially girls, in two parallel societies between which she grew up. Even a descendant of German Russian from her mother’s side, she grew up in Germany and in Vienna. Tina Kult compares traditional methods of education with a focus on the upbringing and education of girls.
Astrid Sodomka & Tabitha Dattinger show themselves as puppets on a string being moved. The fact that women have to be controlled is undermined by the fact that the movement originates from the women themselves. In doing so, they circumvent the centuries-long tradition of patriarchal instructions.
Borjana Ventzislavova uses rituals to question xenophobia, nationalism and women. In times of populists and nationalists, the position of women is also being discussed anew. Nationalist perception of feminist positions versus women at the stove or as a producer of soldiers.
My hope for an awakening humanism, in which all people are valued equally, as a distinction between only good and bad people, dies last. It is our task to pass on the spark of art by discussing responsibility, reflecting on issues and possibly leaving the beaten track.
* Johanna Dohnal (14 February 1939 – 20 February 2010) was a feminist, an Austrian politician and the first Austrian Minister for Women Affairs.
Denise Parizek, March 2020
ARTIST STATEMENTS / TITLES / MEDIA / YEAR / WEBLINKS
This selection of videos are six different perspectives of multidisciplinary artists, all of them have addressed the issue of violence against women with different types of research.
Luciana Esqueda
KATIA ESPERANZA
My Mom’s Chuck / Melodrama and Rebellion
El mandil de mi mamá (melodrama y rebelión).mp4 / 16.3 MB
The cultural construction of the “feminine” as “impure, toxic, dangerous” has used the manifest phenomenon in menstruation to justify the control and regulation of our bodies. Cyclically expelled blood not only makes internal processes visible but also raises the double sense of fertility as a power of creation and as a vulnerable state, since it also places us as abortive machines synchronized to the explicit lunar period in the heavens.
This double power has been banned, violated, feared, violated and marginalized from the patriarchal narrative that has used it to systematically put us in a position of dubious moral quality, where the power of our duality is reduced and subdued.
This piece seeks to generate a split that subverts the control and restriction space in a critical space of resistance and confrontation.
BEATRIZ CANFIELD
An expanded sculpture project
botas.mov / 172 MB
Henceforth, explosives should only be used to play or to create poetic images, aesthetic implosions.
Beatriz Canfield, Mexican visual artist and training sculptor, dynamite with this work the solid principles of sculpture, or what we knew as such, taking discipline to its own limits, in fact many times reducing it to ashes, but without giving up the essential characteristics of such ancient art as the creation of volumes or the intervention of space.
In any case, the sculptural concept of this artist goes beyond mere object representation and requires another type of staging.
The practice proposed by Canfield forces the sculpture to interact with other manifestations, leading to an expanded sculpture practice, which is required in the process section of explosives, photography and video with 4k technology, to finally make all of this an installation of both photographic and video record of the detonation process as of the state of the object / sculpture after the intervention of the explosives, ruins of the matter generated by a sculptural practice in times of war, in a generalized state of siege.
Like the painters who exasperate only the use of the brush, Beatriz Canfield the statism of the subject has been too small for the levels of experimentation to which she wants to submit it, which gives way to a processual sculpture becomes This case in a necessity.
The artist with this work explores the dialectical tensions of the material and revolts against the stillness that is supposed to the sculpture (that is not kinetic), as if the object alone, naked in its plasticity, was unable to say more that what he already says and the pressing circumstances, of social emergency, will force us to say much more, always with the object and its possibilities of transformation as the central axis of the discourse.
XOCHITL RIVERA
El periódico que dice lo que otros callan
Xochitl Rivera.mp4 / 184 MB
The video is’nt propetly for a sensitive people. Is 45 red note’s frontpages selection from may 2009 to June 2010, with two characteristics included, a soft porn’s femenine image and dead scene’s photograph as a result of organized delincuence or not controled hate, wich ended in death, as a daily street newspaper circulation sample of Mexico City’s
LUCIANA ESQUEDA
Projet for non violence / 8:00 min.
This video is an investigation that was carried out at the International House of Women in Trieste Italy, it is a documentary made as a frame, with images and small videos of the experience of working in an event where women danced traditional dance, shared their traditional dishes . This project included learning Italian, trying to integrate women from different parts of the world Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, to Italian society. These women with problems of war, violence and slavery, even from their own family, mother-in-law, husbands or mothers, of these women who used them for countless abuses and prohibitions, these women fled from terrible situations and arrived in Trieste after a tour migratory in search of an integration into society. After this social project that was carried out to help this group of women in the International House of Women in Trieste Italy, they all went to different countries of Europe, looking for a better life with their hidden identities to be able to mix with society and Try to live without the mark of Violence.
SELMA GUISANDE
Red Powder, 2013 / Video installation
The Red Powder video is part of an installation that addresses the issue of anger at political and gender-based violence, as well as at the power structures that are established from the very heart of the home.
From a photograph that I rescued from when I was a 9-year-old girl, I created a cartoon series where a red dot invades and deforms the character. The photo was taken at a time when he felt a lot of fear and anger at various circumstances of political persecution and family violence derived from the dictatorships of South America and the dirty war of the seventies in Mexico. The red dot comes out of the animation and bursts into some classic columns of my mother’s house; in a symbolic act, these emblems of conservative power, are demolished with a trascabo until debris is made.
In the installation, near the video, there is a work table with a piece of those columns painted red; With mallet and chisels, the public can continue to devastate the rubble and thereby claim their own personal protests.
JOSEPHA BLANCHET
DAY AND LIGHTS
video 19.15 mn
Day and lights. How is the light, slowly, vanishing, by revealing a landscape, layer by layer.
I filmed a landscape from different points of view, sitting down near the camera, at different moments of the day. It was a bucolic area in Romania and I was feeling the need to take a break and observe.
The fascinating point was the changing of lights, due to the clouds and the wind, so fast, exposing the contrast between this ancestral place, and the impermanence that I was feeling inside.
I wanted to be on the video, as a character, while taking a nap, as if I would stop a moment there, in this place, and let the things around me unfold.
The vertical composition was created in post-production , made from 11 videos, al recreating an imaginary place from what I remembered and from where my fantasy freely wondered on the top a sunset, by living a time indication, and the idea that something is slowly happening in the most natural way.The light will be back , if you let it go to the dark.
LISA BIRKE
Bombshell
12 min, single-channel digital video
Challenging expectations and subverting gender tropes, a performance-for-video lays bare problematic symbolic messaging embedded in popular culture and cinema through a parody of the unflinching walk in four explosive vignettes.
Egg Stock
8min, single-channel digital video, 2014
Preview link: EggStock
Password: Eggstock_full
In Egg Stock, a businesswoman holds court with her eggs on a golf course. She caddies golf bag, briefcase, and two giant ovaries. The escalating mess chronicles the passing of each month of her paradoxical existence—business tycoon, earth mother, fashion icon. At once visceral and absurd, the work probes notions of gender and sexuality while revealing tropes and challenging the societal expectations placed upon women.
TINA KULT
girls_2, es ist von 2014/15
animation / length: 3’50 / year: 2014 (new version with subtitles 2020)
girls_2 is an animation film, which deals with the lives of the so called „russian-germans“
(„Aussiedler) in Germany. Growing up as a woman in this multi-cultural family, the artist was
herself confronted with many clichés and prejudices. The film is on the one hand a trip to find
the origins of this stereo types and who is actually full filling them, but it is also a journey into her
own past.
ASTRID SODOMKA & TABITHA DATTINGER
https://www.astridsodomka.com
https://www.astridsodomka.com/
Körperfunktionserweiterungskon
(32 sec, loop) 2014
Tabitha Dattinger and Astrid Sodomka are working together as the duo T&A.
Female alliance and complicity is the basis of their working process as well as the recurring subject of performances and performative actions, for the audience and – in a more intimate setting – for the camera. In the triangular studio setting the camera becomes the third team-mate whereas the viewer cannot enter. Perspective, image section and the viewer’s point of view are defined by T&A.
BORJANA VENTZISLAVOVA
AND THE SKY CLEARS UP (MAGIC RESISTANCE)
VIDEO, 2018 4K AND HD VIDEO, 23MIN., COLOR, STEREO
with Songül Boyraz, Renée Gadsden, Esra Emine Demir, Maruša Sagadin, Claudia Slanar
Five protagonists perform artistic-magical rituals at various locations in Vienna, most of which refer to concrete historical events and locations from the Nazi past but play as well an important role today. Applying different artistic-magical processes, the work seeks to act against the current right-wing populist spirits in the Western Hemisphere. And the Sky Clears Up (MAGIC RESISTANCE) sees itself as a visual plea: In individual ceremonies originating from neither dogmatic norms nor official religions but representing abstracted artistic interventions, the protagonists appeal to healing, empowerment and solidarity. Both the city of Vienna and Austria as a state are nothing but examples among a host of other places where right-wing sentiments and politics are nowadays shaping the global landscape.
Sound: Kai-Maier Rothe / Camera: Hannes Böck / Editing: Borjana Ventzislavova /Text: Ovid Pop /Voice Over: Susanne Schuda
Produced in the frame of: Exiled Gaze | Der exilierte Blick
history, in terms of female participation and inequality. I have to mention that today not many countries have contemplated these changes of the current feminine condition, whether by culture, traditions, religions submission. The worrying thing is that first world nations they are not exempt from these problems of violence against female. The recent importance contemplates protecting these rights at the international level, only 60 years after establishing The Human Rights. In turn the recent emerging of the concept of gender equity, which will be seen by the most needy, this group includes women, elderly, sick and migrant children, where laws, social programs and other institutions are created for the protection of these vulnerable groups.
It can be said that we live in a barbarism updated by the evolution of violence and abuse in these unprotected groups, since these institutions and supports are not prepared to face the problems due to lack of economic and educational political support of society and its representatives. Supported by international policies without interest neither for reality nor of the true current situation of these groups.
Therefore I fell the necessity and importance for realizing a project about violence and trauma of women generally and all in-between gender. Working on this current society and the contemporary vision of women who actively work with tools of their profession in the vindication and assessment of these changes and new visions of the environment. Many of them live the social and system harassment in being undervalued and constantly subject to review in terms of their abilities and find possible errors in their performance to be dismissed, unlike men, in the work and professional environment. Or they are still living with a trauma, not being able to cope with it.
Inside me the need arises (from my feminine point of view) to organize a group of women artists and researchers, historians, scientific sociologists, etc. for the development of this international project.
Presenting the Feminine= today project with the contemporary actuality.
Assuming our role of radical changes in our society for a vision of the feminine utopias. That is why I find it important to generate spaces and opportunities to share our work and our knowledge to society; It is not a feminist practice in itself although the foundations of these actions are close to feminism and where there is a lot of lack of education about feminism, both for men and women. I feel it as responsibility and duty to work on the project about female and transgender murder, war trauma, abusement, rape and violence. It is also the commitment to activate the conscience of the population and of the environments for the development of the culture and education of the population of both men and women regarding their own rights and respect for the ideology custom and culture of each person of our planet.
Regarding the subject, I also find it important to take this into account to focus on a social action, which is not only in pieces of art or interesting research, but that the contents also allow us to speak or emphasize the violence that exists.
Currently worldwide as well as for women and men, especially for other sectors of the population that require a lot of attention, these groups live in a submission by the powers and the lack of integral support of real projects that work to enforce the rights as people.
Workers, single mothers, students that many are being victims of violence of different kinds and even death, especially in Central America and South America, in the Middle East the barbarities of war, slavery today marks the higher number in number of people held in this situation throughout the history of civilization, including trafficking in persons.
Even in Austria 19 women has been murdered, mostly by their husbands or partners, always family connected.
This is where art can serve as a tool to talk about this situation and serve as reflection and inclusion to the public to create direct action in society and where research can give visibility to new media, where society is transformed to achieve a better environment.
In society I believe that with different and complex paths we can try to change these visions or processes of society to develop a truly avant-garde thought that shows ways to solve these problems or at least trying to understand as a society how error or failure of the political system and education can be eliminated.
IMAGES
Cover Image by Isidora Krstic
Guadalupe Aldrete 
Vera Klimentyeva
Sandra G Hordóñez 
Laura Ríos
Jacky Muniello 
Maribel Portela