Both within and beyond the realms of art, debates on gender are proliferating and becoming increasingly politicized. Gender’s imprint on art is often characterized by the prevalence of time-based media like performance, the use of the artist’s body, interactivity, and interventions in public spaces, and can be contextualized by concurrent developments in the social sphere. Over time, singular, incipient conceptions of gender have given way to allow for multiple approaches and agents. Feminism, an important origin of discussions around gender, has, since the early 20th century, been pluralized and expanded to encompass many different feminisms. Critical race scholars and activists issued urgent revisions to suffragette movements, and continue to nuance movements toward gender equality. Equally imperative, transnational feminists challenge linguistic and geopolitical hegemony and the efficacy of liberal models of gender. Since the 1990s, queer, transgender, and non-binary communities have further illuminated these debates and destabilized the rigid binary of “Man” and “Woman.” More recently, in relation to gender, technological mediation and animal studies challenge the very meaning and form of the category of “human.” This Theme explores the vicissitudes of gender and its concomitant cultural effects.
Taking as her point of departure the kiondo, and the acknowledgment of the multiple forms technology can take, this essay focuses on Wangechi Mutu’s generative re-imagination and re-inscription of the foundational figure of Eve, gathered together in the untitled portfolio of five etchings and three aquatints, Untitled from Eve.
Therapeutically, and deeply attuned to context, Jaya Jacobo intimates spirits of transfemininity through the temporalities of the Philippines. Without spoon-feeding tangibility or timeline, Jacobo unsensationally invokes perseverance in its purest form.
Through a close reading of Kowkülen (Liquid Being) (2020), a video piece by artist Sebastián Calfuqueo, the author delves into the work’s intricate engagement of Mapuche cosmopolitics, proposing a critical approach to the neoliberal violence of water commodification in Chile vis-à-vis nonbinary modes of inhabiting the world.
This essay brings together Baltic artists Anu Põder and Virgilijus Šonta, considering their mutual interest in human corporeality and non-heteronormative visuality to explore how their artwork reflects a disregard of official concerns of the late Soviet era, and sheds light on the blind spots of the homogenizing use of Western theoretical frameworks.
In 2007, at age twenty-seven, having already spent several years directing and editing audiovisual programs for broadcast, Rosine Mbakam left her native Cameroon to attend film school in Belgium. Here, Mbakam reflects on her experience in a conversation with Sophie Cavoulacos, Assistant Curator in the Department of Film at The Museum of Modern Art.
Refusing to fit into the mainstream art of her time, Gazbia Sirry replaced formal modernist training with local Egyptian art conventions to critically address women’s rights, patriarchy, social justice, and Western imperialism.
To uncomplicatedly enunciate and hyphenate the manifold concentrations of Daniel Lie’s practice would be to miss the artist’s durational engagement with their complexities. Intimately coiled, these lifelong preoccupations are at the heart of the artist’s experience of the world.
In recent years, the Brazilian artist Regina Vater (born 1943) has gained renewed attention for her contributions to Latin American and Latinx feminist art histories of performance. However, her artistic explorations of ecology and the environment are virtually unexamined. This essay considers these subjects in Vater’s work through an analysis of several site-specific, participatory events that together address ecological themes of waste and renewal.
Inji Efflatoun fut une peintresse et une militante marxiste et féministe égyptienne. De juin 1959 à juillet 1963, elle fut emprisonnée par le régime nassérien en raison de son appartenance au parti communiste. Au cours de ces années, elle continua à peindre. Célébrés dès les années 1960, et aujourd’hui recherchés sur le marché de l’art, les tableaux de cette période sont souvent considérés comme les plus importants de son œuvre.
In the 1960s, Zenta Dzividzinska was one of the few women photographers in Riga whose work was highly regarded in the local and international photo club culture. Her collection of images capturing the daily life of three generations of women living in a small house in the country, have remained largely unknown until recently.
Artist and community organizer Tamarra reflects on the personal experiences, emotional complexities, socio-political events, and pilgrimages to non-binary communities across Indonesia that motivated Tamarra’s name change.
Through analyses of works by David Medalla, Nick Deocampo, and Yason Banal, art historian and curator Carlos Quijon, Jr. looks beyond categorical genres of queerness, proposing instead irreducible, methodological modes that embrace its felicitous potential.
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