news release: October 2004
I am not a feminist. I am normal.
Austrian Cultural Forum, London
Opening: Thursday 7 October 2004, 1900h, free
Burn the Bra: performance by Ursula Martinez
Exhibition: 8 October–12 November 2004, Monday–Friday
0900–1700h, free
Katherine Araniello, Marlene Haring,
Anna Jermolaewa, Elke Krystufek,
Mikki Muhr, Sands Murray-Wassink,
Julia Wayne, Carey Young
Discussion: Saturday 9 October 2004, 1100–1800h, free
Feminism don’t stop, I can’t live if you stop:
Female Consequences All Day Breakfast
As part of a season of events on the occasion of the VALIE EXPORT retrospective exhibition at Camden Arts Centre, Marlene Haring presents a group show reflecting on how a younger generation of artists confronts issues with which VALIE EXPORT made her name. The project, including performance, exhibition and discussion, reflects the changes in gender relations since VALIE EXPORT’s pioneering actions spread ‘Genital Panic’ in the late 1960s. The artists taking part demonstrate some of the possibilities, strategies and discourses that have developed alongside the ‘progress’ from open institutional and social discrimination to the far more complex and subtle forms of manipulation, disempowerment and exploitation which women contend with today. The show questions how people deal now with the identification 'feminist'; to what extent women today owe their freedom of expression to the pioneering efforts of artists like VALIE EXPORT, Marina Abramovic, Martha Rosler or Barbara Kruger; to what extent they are taken for granted; what price women pay for the 'normalisation' of women's art production; whether this was ever the aim of feminism and whether it ever really happened anyway.
