Feministická avantgarda 70. let/ Díla ze sbírky VERBUND COLLECTION

The new media in the 1970s

Using new media such as photography, film and video, as well as in performances and actions, the female artists deconstructed existing restrictive cultural and social conditioning, the mechanisms and automatisms of female suppression. For the first time in the history of art, female artists jointly took the “representation of the woman” in the visual arts into their own hands by developing a large number of female identities with self-determination. In their works, they ask radically new questions of society, the art establishment and the roles of the woman. The rejection of traditional, normative concepts connects the commitment of the female artists of this generation. Against the backdrop of the 1968 movement, the women’s movement coined the slogan “The personal is political”. The one-dimensional role assignment as mother, housewife and wife was therefore questioned radically and ironically. 

The exhibition is arranged into five areas: the reduction to the roles of mother, housewife and wife; role-plays as masquerade and parody; the visualisation of the feeling of being locked in and breaking out; female sexuality versus objectification, and the diktat of beauty. The female artists debunk patriarchal ideas about how a woman should live and be as a social construct. What is amazing here is that some female artists selected formally similar strategies, although they did not know each other’s works. 

FEMINIST AVANT-GARDE of the 1970s from the VERBUND COLLECTION, Vienna, unites 62 female artists from Europe, North and South America and Asia who were born between 1929 and 1955.  

Photos: © Michaela Dvořáková / Brno House of Arts