The understanding of pain: Collective memory and mystery view
Tittle：Collective memory and mystery view
Theme：Collective memory, Female perspecitive, pain, identities
Concept & Practice：
Form：Online exhibition
Audience: People interested in feminist art, women art practitioners, students and so on
Location: A newly established art gallery on the outskirts of the city
Space: Approx. 300 sqm
Time: Apirl 20- May 5
It seems Feminists have consistently engaged with ontological and epistemological issues about what counts as knowledge, based on whose worldview, and what knowledge and worldviews remain unrecognized or ignored.
This means that the old narrative models of the past were full of inequalities and that more women should come forward to recount history and current happenings in a feminine way, to express their views and to fight for the right to speak. This is because in the pictorial history of human history, the narrative is dominated by male involvement in events, and the female part of the story is ignored or downplayed. Nancy Spero is a feminist art pioneer who has been influential in this regard since the 1960s, often drawing her images and themes from current and historical events, creating art that, as Nancy puts it, is designed to abandon the traditional perspective of history writing, to deconstruct and juxtapose the past and the present, and to create revisionist art that creates women’s histories that are not written in history books. The history of women is not written in history books. History should not be, and will not be, composed of a single protagonist; whatever the expression, we hope that more and more injustices and inequalities will be seen, valued and ultimately changed.
Nancy has discussed the theme “What if women wrote the myths?”, which directly evokes three elements, female identities, matriarchal myths and symbols, which are closely linked to a long-standing mystery. Indeed, women’s search for the mystical has never ceased and female spirituality has been a common thread for many female artists, with artists such as Marina Abramović, Juliana Huxtable and Sara Knowland using it as a way to invest their energy and work. From the 20th century to modern times, spirituality has been present in many different artistic mediums, including painting, drawing and performance.
In a recent exhibition, the Public Gallery in London presented the first solo exhibition in the UK by French artist Nils Alix-Tabeling. He combined new sculptures, photographs and works on paper with groups of decorative furniture; he imagined a house with three floors where themes of folklore, witchcraft and mysticism dominated. This inspired me very strongly. Why couldn’t I make an exhibition of mystery and collective memory from a female perspective? So with this solo exhibition project, I hope to take the viewer into the mysteries and their collective memories with the resonance of women due to their pain and spirituality.
To this end, I sought out five female artists in this context, namely Gina Pane, Sara Knowland, Judy Chicago, Guo Fengyi and Lina Iris Viktor. Pane’s work expresses the attitude that “our bodies become our most intimate vessels, imprinted with the individual and collective experiences of our existence”, using her own body as a canvas for expressing common concerns around sexuality, spirituality, gender, politics, feminism, the environment and suffering. Pane’s work has contributed greatly to the French body art movement Art Corporel, in which artists use their own flesh and blood as an artistic medium, using the strength and fragility of the body as a viable tool of expression.
For Knowland, the figure of the witch has proved useful in examining femininity, its depiction and expression, through the medium of a grotesque image that invites reflection on female identity. It evokes thoughts of female identity through the medium of a grotesque image. Using the humorous cartoon image of the ‘Wicked Witch of the West’, she has developed a universally recognised theme of shape-shifting images that oscillate between good and evil, human and creature, male and female. In each painting Knowland begins with an art historical reference and the detail of the work, by evoking the ‘witch hunts’ of the medieval West, permeates the suggestive metaphors of political persecution and burning, allowing one to penetrate the absurdity of the work and consider the still worryingly pervasive misogynistic patriarchy.
Judy Chicago’s work has often been described as boundary-shifting, controversial and provocative. Through her installations, the feminist artist aims to liberate herself from minimalism and patriarchy in relation to her own experiences, claiming that “we need a transsexual image of God so that both men and women can see themselves in divinity”. Chicago explains her relationship with religion: “My particular belief system sees the miracle of life as God, so revealing the beauty of ‘atmosphere’ is a way to manifest the sacred.”
Moving on Guo Fengyi, a working artist from Shaanxi, China, who worked in a rubber factory after high school until she gave up work at the age of 39 due to severe arthritis, turned to alternative medicine to alleviate her symptoms and found a new spiritual path in qigong. She began experiencing hallucinations in 1989, which led her to create a large number of drawings, first on the back of calendar pages and later on rice paper. Using India ink and brushes to create works up to five metres long, she draws without regard to her initial plans and finds her own creative direction as she works. Thousands of thin threads form ghostly figures, dragons, phoenixes and human faces that form a unique perspective on her perception of the world.
Lina Iris Viktor is a black female artist whose photographs, paintings and sculptural installations incorporate the cultural history of the global African diaspora and focus on the multifaceted concept of blackness: as colour, as matter and as socio-political consciousness. For Viktor, blackness is the proverbial materia prima: the source, the dark matter that gives birth to all things. often deploying her body in her conceptual art practice, Viktor is the sole performer in a carefully crafted cosmology. She combines photography, performance, painting and sculpture with ancient gilding techniques to create intricate, layered surfaces characterized by the ritualistic use of 24 carat gold leaf. For Viktor, gold is both material and symbolic, a conduit for spiritual transcendence. She creatively re-imagines history by emphasising the cyclical nature of time and the active excavation of our collective past, within the tensions created between aesthetics and politics.
Talking about print, as I’m planning to do an online project now I’m not quite sure if I just need to streamline it down to just the exhibition sign design and poster design and invitation email design. But here I would like to share some designs that I think are interesting and can interact with the audience, and I think it is more important to resonate with them.
The next part of the exhibition was to discuss the location of the exhibition and its spatial design, which I have only tentatively identified as a two-storey gallery in a relatively green and open space on the outskirts of the city. My tentative idea is to enter the pavilion on the ground floor here with the main door, starting with Gina Pane’s work and a text guide, with a TV media fixed on the wall showing her video work, followed by Sara and Judy, and the left-hand wall belonging to Guo Fengyi, where I have placed Lina Iris Viktor by the stairs, where the viewer can choose between After being guided through the exhibition, the viewer can choose whether to go upstairs to a new section or to exit the pavilion into the courtyard for a short break. After the break, the viewer still has the option of going upstairs, which I have not yet designed in detail as I intend to include more new female artists upstairs.
Some of the media I am considering using are as follows, such as the usual projectors, speakers, 20-40second displays, and some interactive devices synthesised through AR technology.
1st March 2023 at 12:39 pm
Learning Outcome #1. Research: Identify, engage with, and apply a range of contemporary curatorial methods, practices and theories relevant to the commissioning, production, dissemination and archiving of cultural practices.
What works well –
Lisirui, this was a comprehensively and thoroughly researched presentation that demonstrated the depth of research and thinking you have undertaken while working on your project.
There is a clarity of focus to your proposal and it is ambitious in scope. You have engaged with key artists and writing regarding feminist visual art explorations of the subject.
What could be improved –
While the ambition of your proposal is commendable you may need to scale back the level of artist work you wish to include. By this I mean that the artists you have suggested wanting to work with are considerable figures who have gallery representation and are collected by museums. In this sense, they are more ‘major’ than ‘minor’ (Hunt, 2011) and you may need to consider how to pivot your plans to use more accessible and realisable artworks and artists.
Learning Outcome #2: Practice: Working with your peers, commission, produce, disseminate and archive cultural practices, locating your approach in relation to the expanded field of contemporary curatorial theory and practice.
What works well –
You have clearly spent time considering the subject you wish to explore curatorially and the depth of research into not only the theoretical concepts but also practical aspirations for your project demonstrate professionalism and awareness of what is needed to produce a curatorial project.
What could be improved –
As noted above, shifting focus on who is included in your exhibition (Online or in Edinburgh) may be necessary to make the project feasible. An interesting way to do this could be to use the works and ideas of the artists you’ve already researched as an invitation to welcome responses from local or early career artists who work on similar subject matters. One way could be to commission or work with students in Edinburgh who have overtly feminist practices, these could be students on the UG or PG programmes. You could also draw from a wider pool of artists if you are producing an online component of the exhibition.