23 Sep What If Women Ruled the World?

Source Credit:  Content and images from Ocula Magazine.  Read the original article - https://ocula.com/magazine/features/what-if-women-ruled-the-world/

An unanswerable question is emblazoned in Greek and English on the north and south facades of the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens.

Created in neon, the words ‘What if Women Ruled the World?’ shine brightly, clearly visible to drivers stuck in traffic on the busy Syngrou Avenue in front of the museum. It’s one component, from 2016, of Israeli artist Yael Bartana‘s 2017 riff on the Stanley Kubrick anti-war, all-male satire Dr. Strangelove (1964). In Bartana’s version, first performed at the Manchester International Festival, an all-female cabinet—composed of politicians, philosophers, scientists, and actors—debates how to avert nuclear disaster in a fictitious country. Edited footage of the performance became the film Two Minutes to Midnight (2021), screened on a loop in a gallery—the war room, if you will—as part of the museum’s year-long programme of exhibitions and events. As the tense debate around the ethics of state power unfolds, one thing becomes apparent: whatever your gender, consensus around complex issues is almost always elusive.

Exhibition view: Danai Anesiadou, D POSSESSIONS, Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (14 December 2023–27 October 2024). Courtesy the artist. Photo: we document art.

Museum director Katerina Gregos—who took the helm in 2021 and hasn’t paused for breath since—rose to the challenge of Bartana’s question and ran with it. The result is a hugely ambitious, four-part cycle of exhibitions dedicated to the work of historic and contemporary women artists. Since December 2023, ‘What if Women Ruled the World?’ has comprised 18 solo exhibitions, installations, and projects and a re-hang of the permanent collection—of which 37 percent of the works are by women (a relatively high percentage). This rich survey of more than 40 historical and contemporary artists from Greece and beyond is a particularly apt provocation in a country in which women were only granted the vote in 1952 and where, according to the European Institute for Gender Equality, ’42 percent of women who have ever been in a relationship have experienced violence by an intimate partner’. It’s also a riposte to the global underrepresentation of female artists in collections, exhibitions, and the traditional narratives of art history.

Penny Siopis, Note 4 (2013). Glue and ink on paper. 24 x 32 cm. Collection of Catherina and Michael Roets. © Penny Siopis. Courtesy the artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg/Amsterdam.

I visited the fourth and final iteration of the programme, and an entire day was hardly long enough to take it all in. In June alone, seven new exhibitions were inaugurated. A highlight is the first major institutional European retrospective of the South African artist Penny Siopis, whose parents emigrated from Greece in the 1950s. Railing against apartheid, racism, and sexism in her paintings, films, and installations, Siopsis never resorts to slogans or simplifications; her examination of history and belonging is inflected by her own family’s sense of displacement.

By contrast, the paintings and animations in Iranian American artist Tala Madani‘s solo presentation, Shitty Disco, puncture the pomposity and power of patriarchal behaviours in darkly funny, often scatological takedowns. More enigmatic is the immersive installation D POSSESSIONS (2024) by Greek Belgian artist Danai Anesiadou—an eye-popping red environment filled with a slew of mysterious sculptures, symbols, collages, furniture, and, disturbingly, two guillotines, which variously allude to cinema, the occult, Ancient Greece, surrealism, and politics. Equally compelling is the site-specific commission The Luminous Cave (2024) by Greek artist Eva Stefani: a curious hut created from medical X-rays, as if a body has become a building.

Exhibition view: Phyllida Barlow, RIG: untitled; blocks, ΕΜΣΤ, Athens (13 June–27 October 2024). D.Daskalopoulos Collection. © Phyllida Barlow Estate. Courtesy Phyllida Barlow Estate and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Paris Tavitian.

At every turn, What if Women Ruled the World? offers up something new: a monumental installation by the late British sculptor Phyllida Barlow (her first in Greece); films and artworks by the Moroccan-French artist Bouchra Khalili that refer to story-telling, ghosts, phantasmagoria, magic lanterns, and more; a photo-essay highlighting the impact of domestic violence on women by Susan Meiselas. I was mesmerised by a suite of intricately detailed, never-before-shown cosmic drawings from the 1960s and ’70s of strange human/demon/insect hybrids by the late Greek artist Eleni Pitari-Pangalou. A mini-retrospective dedicated to Chryssa Romanos—an artist who lived from 1931 to 2006 between Athens and Paris—makes clear that her smart, playful paintings, collages, maps, and sculptures exploring myths, labyrinths, and consumerism should be better known outside her home country.

Eleni Pitari-Pangalou, Untitled (c. 1960–70). Ink on paper. 73 x 70 cm. Maioletti-Pitari Collection.

In Greek mythology, the Phoenician princess Europa—after whom, of course, Europe is named—was abducted and raped by Zeus in the form of a white bull. In Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley’s wildly original short film The Rape of Europa (2021)—a response not only to the foundational myth but to Titian’s painting of the same name from 1560–62—she is reimagined as a highly stylised, traumatised woman who denounces misogyny and sexual violence via jokes, punning rhymes, and wordplay. Seeing the film in Athens—a city where the ghosts of its classical past still hold centre stage—lends the work an eerie, time-travelling relevance.

Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley, The Rape of Europa (2021) (still). HD video with sound. 9 mins, 7 secs. Courtesy the artists and Pilar Corrias, London.

That there is no one answer to the question posed by the title of this exciting and ambitious programme is as it should be. Gregos employs art not to reach a single conclusion but to animate discussion—not just around gender but the function of visual culture. In this, she’s succeeded admirably, supplanting the original question with another: how can change be effected if it’s not first imagined? —[O]

What if Women Ruled the World? is on show at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens from 14 December 2023 to 10 November 2024.

Source Credit:  Content and images from Ocula Magazine.  Read the original article - https://ocula.com/magazine/features/what-if-women-ruled-the-world/