Teresa Feodorowna Ries and The Witch (original) (raw)
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THE EXHIBITION LOST ELEMENT / RE-CONSTRUCTION OF THE WITCH CURATORIAL REFLECTIONS by Anka LESNIAK
Art and Documentation / Sztuka i Dokumentacja, 2022
The exhibition "Lost Element / Re-construction of the Witch" at the VBKOE was the next chapter of a collective artistic investigation of TFR Archive on the life and damaged or lost artworks by Teresa Feodorowna Ries (1866-1956), an Austrian artist of Jewish origin. The main topic of the exhibition was her damaged sculpture "The Witch" (1895), representing a vigorous young woman while preparing for the Witches’ Sabbath and cutting her toenails with big shears. Ries's sculpture was an extraordinary example of an artwork challenging the old patriarchal order and symbolizing feminine power. The figure seems full of vigour and eroticism and simultaneously a rebel who challenges the clichés of representations of women in art and goes beyond stereotypes. It was vandalized several times and the hand with scissors was also lost. The exhibition Lost Element/ Re-construction of the Witch asked the question of how we can work with loss, which here is represented by the lost hand of “The Witch.” “The Witch” deprived of the hand with shears refers to the woman deprived of her agency. The sculpture also represents the fate of the artist herself, who was persecuted by the Nazis because of her Jewish origin and had to flee to Switzerland, leaving all her life and artworks behind. The exhibition in the Association of Austrian Women Artists gallery was also an excellent opportunity to reinterpret and give a new spirit to the works of Teresa F. Ries as an artist of multi-ethnic roots, by contemporary women artists of different origins, who were connected through her story. It's also a tribute to the female artist, who was brave enough to live the life she wanted, even though she had to face constant prejudices towards her gender and origin. She was one of the women who paved the path for the next generations of women artists.
Women Artists in the Kunsthalle Bern: An Archival Investigation
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2021
Arts. His current interests include the archival strategies of research based art and the founding of the F+F School of Art and Design as a laboratory for experimental design. The archival exhibition on the lower floor of the Kunsthalle focuses on a selection of women artists who have enriched the Kunsthalle Bern's program with their substantial artistic contributions ever since its founding. Selected documents from the Kunsthalle's archive as well as from the artists' personal archives broaden the picture. The inquiry brought about surprising results: from its foun ding in 1918 until the early 1960s, more women artists exhibited at the Kunsthalle Bern than at any other Swiss insti tution. Most of them were affiliated with the Swiss Society of Women Artists in the Visual Artists SSWA and made sure they and other women were visible at the institution they had cofounded. As the number of women exhibiting at the Kunst halle dropped in the years from 1960 to 1990, this was repeatedly met with protest.
Exhibiting Women's Art in Post-War Europe
2019
This essay elaborates on women-only shows organized in post-war Europe by the associations of (women) artists that – as initial research has shown – were major initiators of this type of exhibitions during the period. It proposes a comparative analysis of operations of this type of association in three countries whose situations during and after the war differed considerably: Austria, France and Poland. The geopolitical positions of these countries and the gender politics they implemented influenced the operation of (women) artists’ associations and the organization of their annual exhibitions, but also the place they occupy in the art historical narratives. Agata Jakubowska* Adam Mickiewicz University * Agata Jakubowska is Associated Professor and Deputy Director at the Department of Art History, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. She is the author of On Margins of the Mirror. Female Body in the Polish Women Artists’ Works (in Polish, Poznań 2004), Multiple Portrait of the Alina...
Actual Problems of Theory and History of Art: Vol. 11, 2021
This work mentions the interplay of our respective research and two case studies related to the situation of female artists at the beginning of the 20 th century. Wishing to react to some issues related to art and gender studies, let us start by presenting in a very fast way a project carried out in Rome from 2016 to 2019. Many works have been published reporting data and statistics on the presence of women in the art world (from the provocative Guerrilla Girls, to the results of research by Taylor Whitten Brown for Art Basel in 2019 and by Antonietta Trasforini in Italy) [15; 35; 31]. The project I am talking about, ended with the publication of a volume entitled FEMM[E] Arte [eventualmente] femminile (FEMM[E] [Eventually] feminine Art) [19], it was born and developed in an unusual and original way, perhaps less scientific, appointed over time as an operational specificity (Ill. 59). Promoters and curators of the initiative were: Veronica Montanino, a Roman artist who has been working since 2000 with great visual impact works inspired by camouflage and metamorphosis; I myself, a teacher and art historian engaged since 2005, among other things, in research on art in relation to women; about sixty female Roman artists who spontaneously joined the survey. The idea was born from the MAAM-Museo dell' Altro e dell' Altrove (MAAM-Museum of the Others and the Elsewhere), a former Roman factory occupied by immigrants-but also by homeless Italian citizens-due to the housing emergency in Rome. Here, in the succession of rooms not originally intended for domestic life or for works of art, an exhibition of 500 free and spontaneous interventions by artists from Italy and other parts of the world was held, in order to raise a "barricade" to defend the allocation and the dignity of the people who had settled there [10]. We observed that many of the artists working there were women, in a percentage not usually seen in museums. Some questions raised up: was the high number of female artists in such an irregular and unconventional place a symptom or consequence of the difficulties that female artists still encounter when entering the art system and market? Did the operation in its entirety (and all the engaged artists as well), inspired by principles such as acceptance, inclusion, the need to defend a "non-economic" humanity, have a generally "feminine" character, opposed to the financial rationalism of our times? What had changed compared to the experiences and studies of female artists and scholars who, at least starting from the 1970s, had tried to highlight and undermine the strongly masculine character of the art system and historiography?