Gender Check

Gender Check
Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe

Gender Check is the first comprehensive exhibition featuring art from Eastern Europe since the 1960s focusing on gender roles. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, curator Bojana Pejić, along with a team of experts from 24 different countries, has put together a selection of more than 400 works including paintings, sculpture, installations, photography, posters, films and videos. The exhibition features more than 200 artists and thus paints an exceptionally diverse picture of a certain chapter in art history that remained largely undiscovered until recently, and which could also have a significant impact on contemporary gender discourse. Gender Check follows the shifts and changes in the representation of male and female role models in art, taking a particular look at how they develop under different socio-political conditions.

The exhibition shows the interrelationship between art and history, taking both a chronological and thematic approach. Up to the 1960s, heroic male and female workers were the dominant figures in the socialist realist artistic tradition. At the time, unofficial art reacted to the state’s reality-transforming programme of a “sexless society” with irony and exposed it for what it was. Following the period of collective state utopian aesthetics, a variety of individual and more open tendencies emerged on a local level - periodically provoking a hostile response - that created independent spaces for nonconformist art. ... (more)

Bojana Pejic research on Montenegro

READING GENDER. Art, Power and Politics of Representation in Eastern Europe

No registration is needed to attend the symposium.

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Friday, 13 November 2009

14:00 - 14:45

Introduction: Christine Böhler, Rainer Fuchs, Bojana Pejić

Section I: CAN FEMINISM SPEAK EAST?
Moderator: Hedwig Saxenhuber

14:45 - 15:30	Katrin Kivimaa, Twenty Years Later: Actually Existing Feminism and Art in EasternEurope
15:30 - 16:00	Artist’s presentation: Anna Daučíková
16:00 - 16:30	Artist’s presentation: Mare Tralla
16:30 - 16:45	Questions and answers
16:45 - 17:15	Coffee break
17:15 - 18:00	Vjollca Krasniqi, Returning the Gaze: Gender and Power in Kosovo
18:00 - 19:15	Experts’ panel: Ivana Bago, Laima Kreivyte, Suzana Milevska, Almira Ousmanova, Angelika Richter. Moderator: Mara Traumane
19:30	Performance, Egle Rakauskaite, For Guilty without the Guilt. Trap. Expulsion from Paradise

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Saturday, 14 November 2009

Section II: FUCK YOUR GENDER
Moderator: Johanna Schaffer

10:00 - 10:45	Juan Vicente Aliaga, Strange Fruit. Sexual Diversity, Art and Politics in Today’s World
10:45 - 11:00	Break
11:00 - 13:30	Statements by Jet Moon and Agnieszka Morawinska. Discussion with Juan Vicente Aliaga, Agnieszka Morawinska, Johanna Schaffer. Moderator: Jet Moon

Section III: SUBVERTING CANONS
Moderator: Bojana Pejić

14:30 - 16:00	Perspectives on Gender and the Canon of Art History. Discussion with Edit András and Griselda Pollock
16:00 - 16:45	Keti Chukhrov, Art - Between Gender and the Canon of Art History
16:45 - 17:15	Coffee break
17:15 - 19:00	Local and International Canons. Discussion with Katy Deepwell, Silvia Eiblmayr, Marina Grzinić, Izabela Kowalczyk, Gislind Nabakowski. Moderator: Bojana Pejić