Jana Želibská
Jana Želibská (Olomouc, Czech Republic, 1941)
Cash on Delivery, 1978
Screen printing on paper
VERBUND COLLECTION, Vienna
© Jana Zelibska / VERBUND COLLECTION, Vienna

Subverting stereotypes and illuminating the position assigned to women in patriarchal society, the artists gathered in the exhibition Insurgencies – Feminist Vanguard of the 1970s: works from the Verbund Collection, Vienna They are part of a large international movement in which artistic experimentation and feminist activism converge and reinforce each other. Dedicated to these issues since its creation in 2004, the Verbund Collection – created by Europe's leading hydroelectric power producer – has built up an important collection on the subject over the last few decades. And since 2010 it has been holding traveling exhibitions of this important chapter of its collection. The exhibition that will open next Saturday (March 28) at Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) This is the first of these tours outside of Europe.

Featuring approximately 70 works by 30 artists, the exhibition focuses primarily on feminist production developed in Austria during the 1970s, but also includes artists from other countries such as Italy, Japan, Poland, and the United States. It fosters an interesting dialogue between the collection of the host museum and the visiting collection. In each of the five thematic sections around which the exhibition is organized, there is a selected work from the MAC collection that reaffirms the importance of the poetics explored and also the connection between the selected artists and the Brazilian institution's collection. The intention is to stimulate fruitful synchronicities between the collections, resulting in coincidences such as the encounter of two works by the Italian-Austrian artist Mirella Bentivoglio – “Ti Amo” and “Love Story” – and two series of images by the Polish artist Anna Kutera. Although the Verbund Collection includes Brazilian artists, the curatorial team chose to focus on Austrian and Eastern European production, as well as creators rarely seen in Brazil.

Titled after key issues that mark this “new and fundamental 'image of women' from a female perspective”—as defined by curator Gabriele Schor—the structuring axes of the exhibition are: “Wife/Mother/Housewife”, “Imprisonment/Liberation”, “Dictates of Beauty/Female Body”, “Female Sexuality”, and “Identity/Games of Representation”. The boundaries between them are sometimes subtle, with works that could move through more than one core, indicative of the very intertwining between the multiple approaches worked on by the artists and also of a clear resonance between the struggle for women's rights and an international scene marked by more general political contestation.

As Ana Magalhães, curator of, explains Insurgencies According to MAC and a researcher dedicated to Austrian and Italian art, “the 1970s were marked, in several countries—including Brazil, Italy, Eastern European nations, and much of Latin America—by the consolidation of exceptional regimes. In these contexts, control over women's bodies and behaviors went hand in hand with the repression of other forms of diversity.” These productions share a cohesive basis: the battle for a less oppressive society, for art forms capable of revolutionizing tradition, and for a more egalitarian space between genders.

In these works, the female body is simultaneously a theme and an allegory, condensing into images and actions the naturalized position of women in society as wives, mothers, and objects of desire. Acting forcefully and literally within these fissures, these artists unveil the different layers of hypocrisy and control that cover and naturalize unequal power relations. In line with the research of the period, the artists draw on avant-garde languages—video, photography, performance—to expose these wounds. Censored, stereotyped, or made invisible, they create images that make explicit the repressive character of society. In the case of Austria, a deeply Catholic country marked by persistent denial of the trauma of its Nazi past, moral conservatism is especially entrenched—issues such as divorce, abortion, and women's autonomy would only advance in the 1980s. In this context, Vienna functioned as a kind of rebellious enclave, in intense transit with Berlin and Bern, and Viennese Actionism emerged as a visceral response to this accommodation.

It is no coincidence that works such as those by Viennese artist Renate Bertlmann – who illustrates the exhibition invitation with a performance photograph entitled “Pregnant Bride in a Wheelchair” (1976) – acquire here a dimension of provocation that goes far beyond the formal gesture. Florentina Pakosta radicalizes this critique in “The Wedding Ring and its Consequences,” a drawing in which a decapitated female figure prominently displays the finger with the wedding ring – representing the castration imposed by marriage. “Entrave,” by Scottish artist Elaine Shemilt, is another example of defying this suffocating situation. The artist, who heard from a professor at the Slade School of Art in London that one could not be a woman and an artist at the same time, uses her image bound with adhesive tape as a kind of silent protest. “Through irony and provocation, these works express a powerful female self-confidence, challenging existing roles and stereotypes,” says Gabriele Schor.

Featured in the selection, VALIE EXPORT confronts hypocrisy head-on in actions such as "Aktionshose: Genitalpanik" ("Action Pants: Genital Panic"). This performance is present in Insurgencies Through a photographic record, the artist parades wearing bottomless pants, with her genitalia exposed, while carrying a rifle.

Another work by the artist, whose artistic name satirizes consumerism and art as an export product, is "Madonna dos Nascimentos" (Madonna of Births), a photo collage based on Michelangelo's "Pietà" in which she offers a biting reinterpretation of icons from art history. Using quotation and sarcasm, the image confronts, according to the curators, "the idealized representation of female suffering in her role as mother with the disenchanted reality of the housewife surrounded by everyday objects."

Other artists explore references belonging to the art canon with acerbity. This is the case, for example, of the group Int. Akt (photographed by Margot Pilz), which reenacts a Last Supper by Kremser Schmidt, a celebrated Austrian Baroque painter, replacing the male characters with women, or Ulrike Rosenbach, who establishes a game of representation and identity alternation with female myths such as Venus, Medusa, and "Supergirl".

The Brazilian art circuit has already been promoting a historiographical reinterpretation of gender, with exhibitions such as "Radical Women" and "Feminist Histories," and delving into the work of fundamental artists such as Marina Abramovic, Ana Mendieta, and Orlan. Insurgencies broaden that horizon, Bringing in a layer that has been rarely seen here before — that of the Austrian and Eastern European avant-garde — and deepening the debate on the relationships between artistic experimentation, gender, and political resistance.


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