13 August – 17 September 2006
Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz/Basel, Switzerland

3 Hamburger Frauen, Maura Biava. Esra Ersen, Sylvie Fleury, Dani Gal,
Andrea Geyer/Sharon Hayes, Zilla Leutenegger, Erik van Lieshout, Katrin
Mayer, Josephine Meckseper, Renata Poljak, Elodie Pong, Naomi Fisher
for the Radical Cheerleaders, Aurora Reinhard, Maki Tamura, Pernille
Kapper Williams, Ella Ziegler

Kunsthaus Baselland
St. Jakob-Strasse 170, CH-4132 Muttenz/Basel
T: 41 61 312 83 88; F: 41 61 312 83 89
http://www.kunsthausbaselland.ch

1 September – 26 November 2006
Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, Ireland

3 Hamburger Frauen, Shannon Bool, Cabello/Carceller, Esra Ersen, Dani
Gal, Andrea Geyer/Sharon Hayes, Jaki Irvine, Katrin Mayer, Josephine
Meckseper, Michaela Meise, Elodie Pong, Aurora Reinhard, Una Quigley,
Pernille Kapper Williams

Lewis Glucksman Gallery
University College Cork, Ireland
T: 353 21 4901844; F: 353 21 4901823

http://www.glucksman.org

16 September – 29 October 2006
Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg, Germany

3 Hamburger Frauen, Dani Gal, Andrea Geyer/Sharon Hayes, Dorit
Margreiter/Annette Baldauf, Katrin Mayer, Josephine Meckseper, MOSH
MOSH, Elodie Pong, Naomi Fisher for the Radical Cheerleaders, Ella
Ziegler

Halle fuer Kunst
Reichenbachstr. 2, D-21335 Lueneburg
T: 49 4131 402001; F: 49 4131 721344

http://www.halle-fuer-kunst.de

A project by Sabine Schaschl-Cooper, Bettina Steinbrügge and René Zechlin

The original goals of the women’s movement, i.e. legal equality,
favorable educational perspectives for women, and combating male
violence, have been achieved almost everywhere—as opposed to culturally
conveyed clichés and traditions passed on from one generation to the
next, which are much harder to overcome. But by and large it seems as
if the women’s movement has become a victim of its own success and has
brought about its own demise, as mostly young women, when being
confronted with such issues as equitable participation in education and
equal opportunities, don’t actually seem to notice the areas in which
they are still substantially disadvantaged. Hence, they often display
negative knee-jerk reactions to and a hostile attitude towards
mainstream feminism or “affirmative action” and quotas for women, and
this simply because they don’t realize that shortcomings still exist
and don’t want to be branded as putative victims. For this reason, the
term “feminism” has come to be negatively connoted. Naturally, things
are a lot more complex, as illustrated by symptoms such as “cooling
out” or by a study conducted by MIT in 1998 which suggests that that
“gender discrimination in the 1990s is subtle but pervasive, and stems
from unconscious ways of thinking that have been socialized into all of
us, men and women alike.” A full-fledged women’s movement pursuing
legitimate goals seems to have vanished; what we can see, however, is
that women are very much involved in the workings of social mechanisms.
This tends to be the view taken by well-educated single women that
belong to the upper middle class—women who are aware that, having
almost the same opportunities, they can also shape public and political
life provided they are smart and know how to act and hold their own in
what is still largely a man’s world. Building women’s confidence and
raising their self-esteem, a professed goal of second-generation
feminists fighting for recognition, seems to have produced tangible
results.

According to Peggy Phelan, feminism is based on the conviction that
gender constitutes a fundamental category in our social systems. The
latter are predicated on hierarchical patterns that normally put men
first and women second, giving preference to the male segment of the
population in a variety of fields. Even though many demands made by the
feminist movement have clearly been met, the cultural image of women
still leaves a lot to be desired. There is a certain backlash regarding
the image of women: In a time of crisis in employment markets outdated
concepts on the division of labor continue to hold sway, as demands for
autonomy and full equality are not given the weight they deserve. To
what an extent do our societies, men and women alike, still consider
the female body the basis of women’s identity? When talking about the
return of sexism, the question arises as to how young female artists
deal with these phenomena. After all, critical feminist artists such as
Hannah Wilke or Nancy Spero have triggered a “mainstreaming” of
sexuality in art. The exhibition revolves around these questions. It
looks into approaches currently taken by young female “post-feminist”
artists to this issue, and it explores whether or not ambivalence or
rejection of feminism can also be found in them. How is feminism
connoted? Are distinctions made between “difference-based feminism” and
its constructivist embodiments, i.e. between essentialist
interpretations of femininity and discursive-relativistic methodologies
that pursue no political or identity-related agenda?