Future Female

23.09.2017 - 06.10.2017

Mz Baltazar’s Laboratory, Wien / Österreich

It was true for a long time, “that the feminine occurs only within models and laws devised by male subjects. Which implies that there are not really two sexes, but only one. A single practice and representation of the sexual. With its history, its requirements, reverses, lacks, negative(s) ... of which the female sex is the mainstay. This model, a phallic one, shares the values promulgated by patriarchal society and culture, values inscribed in philosophical corpus: property, production, order, form, unity, visibility .... . . and erection.”[1]

Our generation has the luxury of being able to draw on a number of female role models letting us find our place in history, insert ourselves in a history of female perspective. Nonetheless the patriarchal system is predominantly ruling the daily life and operations and to access the historical female perspective and its heritage can be challenging. Hence female networking and knowledge production/exchange is crucial and very valuable also for our generation. The feminist hacker space Mz* Baltazar’s laboratory lives this reality. Mz* Baltazar’s Lab aims at generating an accessible, inclusive, open, safer and radical space, from which to evolve as people and as a community. In the spirit of sisterhood and exchange the exhibition „Future Female*“ was conceived as a chain invitation. Signe Rose suggested Anna Holtz and Juliet Carpenter, Juliet invited Joanna Neumegen.

Rose is my long-term friend and go to person for my thoughts on and struggles with being a woman. The „chain of invitation“ for this group exhibition has two reasons. First one being that I trust that artists are always better informed and imbedded in a peer group than curators. Secondly this form of working developed to become my curatorial practice starting out in the exhibition space in my private apartment where trust on many levels was - out of practical reasons (set up in my apartment while I was working in a commercial gallery, the people the artist would attract to my home ect.) — a main ingredient of cooperation with an artist.

The works of Anna Holtz are situated between the poles of artificiality and naturality, the 20th century prime antagonisms as metaphor for the male and female (culture vs. nature). The new material of organic film, that Holtz uses in her works touches on a major issue of our times. Plastic will be a sediment in the geological layers of this planet, as a testimony of the years between 1950-2030. Organic film is biologically degradable. And dyeable like fabric. As is the case for both untitled works in the exhibition, dyed with chamomile, as organic as the material itself. The objects seem sensual. Like buttocks. Anna Holtz inserts herself seamlessly into the contexts of abstraction and corporeality created by artists like Alina Szapocznikow, Maria Bartuszova or Eva Hesse: „[…]deliberations on material, materiality and the question where material begins to suggest a body or corporeality or when it starts to embody something.” (Anna Holtz)

The title of the show makes reference to the slogan „The future is female“ written on so many t-shirts of mainstream clothing chains sparking a debate of what is helpful for a movement and what might reduce it to a harmless fashion statement as criticized by Jana Gioia Baurmann in Zeit Magazin on April 5, 2017. Her article refers to the Dior t-shirt with the writing „We should all be feminists“, however since September 2016 when this shirt has been shown at the Paris Fashion week all major clothing chains have produced plain t-shirts with similar slogans like as mentioned „The future is female“. The author argues, that with this gesture of commercializing a movement, the movement loses its impact, its edge, its force to advance change and points out that t-shirt for 550 € completely misrepresents core issues of the movement like equality for underprivileged women and minorities. To provide a space and a voice for who doesn't fit into main stream is a crucial part of the multilayered practice of writer and DJ Joanna Neumegen who presents a poem and a painting in the exhibition.

The title also raises the question of what will be perceived and lived as "female", or remain of that category in the future, indicated by the asterisk at the end. Signe Rose's new works are emblematic for this thought. The fashion world made a remarkable contribution in the effort to blur the black and white of male and female and make gender fluidity visible in the main stream. People like Elliot Sailors, Beck Holladay, Erica Linder, Pat Dudek or Ari Fitz helped pave the way for a less stereotypical representation of the human race. Rose chops all representation up into fragments and puts them back together the way they make most sense regardless of their characteristics of gender and race or attribution to reality or fiction.

Similarly Juliet Carpenter's video in collaboration with Gregory Kan shows an animated head without obvious gender features. Juliet and Gregory work as software developers. For this project they set up a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). “Recurrent nets are a type of artificial neural network designed to recognize patterns in sequences of data, such as text, genomes, handwriting, the spoken word, or numerical times series data emanating from sensors, stock markets and government agencies. From there you can take samples from the network where it tries to reproduce content in line with the patterns it has learned." (Juliet Carpenter) This specific network for "mean time" was trained in contemporary poetry and a script was developed from it. The performer of the script in the work is non-binary ZK Steiner-Fox. "[…] a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints."[2]

[1] Luce Irigaray, This sex which is not one, Cornell University Press, New York, 1977, S. 86.

[2] (http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Haraway-CyborgManifesto-1.pdf, S. 295)

[Quelle: Einladung]