Empowerment Art & Feminisms
I am honored to participate in the show Empowerment: Art and Feminisms, Pune, India from 5 to 25 October, 2024, which is an excerpt from the exhibition at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg 2022, . The exhibition will tour 2025-26 to Mumbai, New Delhi, Colombo and Kolkata.
Curated by Andreas Beitin, Katharina Koch und Uta Ruhkamp, Co-produced by Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg and Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai
Presented in Pune by Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Pune
More about the project:
Feminism has long since become part of popular culture in Europe and the United States. However, despite worldwide movements, protests, and demonstrations to establish equality, it is still not possible in the twenty-first century to speak of comprehensive gender equality with regard to women and LGBTQIA+ communities—neither in this country nor elsewhere. Structural relationships of power and inequality are responsible for discrimination and exploitation up to physical violence or even femicides. Countless artists worldwide react to these untenable conditions with their feminist-oriented works.
Against the backdrop of ecological catastrophes, war, the pandemic, post-colonialism, and growing social inequality, they also address the intersections of various global fields of conflict and broaden the horizon for planetary approaches that also include nature with its non-human beings in a way that is comprehensive, inclusive, and forward-looking: Activist, provocative, and direct, but also poetic, humorous, and subtle, they strive to achieve equal and future-oriented life opportunities for themselves, for other marginalized people, and for societies as a whole.
Presented at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in 2022-23, with roughly 100 artistic positions from some fifty countries on all continents, Empowerment offered for the first time a comprehensive global overview of art and feminisms in the twenty-first century. This traveling version of Empowerment, stays true to the international scope of the exhibition, within the framework of seven thematic fields that have emerged from worldwide research, Empowerment explores the following questions, among others: How do artists act out of their respective situations in the postcolonial, digital present? What emancipatory understanding underlies their art? How do they broaden their view of a feminist-oriented future? Can approaches to healing or reconciliation be discerned? With their works, the artists negotiate issues of social inequality, sexism, racism, and the entanglements of forms of discrimination, possibilities of resistance, self-empowerment, and healing, as well as the relationship between bodies, technology, and ecological concerns. These are all issues that affect everyone.
In order to do justice to these globally significant perspectives, the curators initiated several international networks of scholars, curators, and artists for Empowerment. The research for the exhibition was thus supplemented by artistic proposals from globally active regional experts. The curatorial perspective was also expanded by the five invited collectives, two of whom are present in the current show, namely, Nacional TROVOA (Brazil), and Sandbox Collective (India). As Art Mediators, Sandbox Collective has curated a series of multidisciplinary talks and performances in collaboration with local artists, and initiatives. Given the international scope of the exhibition, this traveling version also features an outreach and engagement programme conceptualized by Dr Nishant Shah and Point of View, Mumbai spanning the entire tour. The aim of this is to help audiences engage with the different practices and contexts visible within the show.
The exhibition project Empowerment is curated by Andreas Beitin, Katharina Koch, Uta Ruhkamp and co produced by Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg and Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai.
