Gender Check: A Reader – Art and Theory in Eastern Europe
Edited by Bojana Pejić, ERSTE Foundation, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna
Book Launch and Talk
Friday, 19 November at 7 p.m. at
MUMOK, Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Viennawww.gender-check.at
Comments and discussion: Angela Dimitrakaki, Johanna Schaffer
This anthology gathers writings on art and gender in Eastern Europe, contributing almost neglected historical and contemporary aspects to present debates, thereby shedding new light on the field as a whole. It is the first representative collection of essays investigating gender issues in social, cultural, and artistic contexts in Armenia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovak Republic, and Slovenia. The authors reveal how social and cultural developments and political ideologies affect the construction of gender identities in visual art produced before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Bojana Pejić has selected a wide variety of texts originally published between 1988 and 2009, dealing with the socialist and post-socialist periods. The reader demonstrates that leading Eastern European feminist and gender scholars, art historians, curators, and artists created a polylogue, a discursive condition that is not a monolithic and unanimous Eastern European dispositif but dialogical and inter-relational. The volume includes a bibliography collecting entries from twenty-four countries, reflecting the reception of gender theories in Eastern European art history and criticism. Gender Check: A Reader offers a key strategic tool for an interrogative and corrective historiography not only of Eastern Europe but of feminist art history in general.
The reader is part of the research and exhibition project Gender Check. The exhibition Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe was shown at MUMOK, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna 2009–10 and Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw 2010. The Gender Check project was initiated and supported by ERSTE Foundation and realised in collaboration with the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna.
Texts by: Anna Alchuk, Branislava Andjelković, Edit András, Zdenka Badovinac, Ágnes Berecz, Lyudmila Bredikhina, Branislav Dimitrijević, Hildtrud Ebert, Ewa Franus, Jana Geržová, Nataša Ilić, Eva Khachatryan, Katrin Kivimaa, Izabela Kowalczyk, Vjollca Krasniqi, Laima Kreivytė, Dejan Kršić, Paweł Leszkowicz, Suzana Milevska, Danica Minić, Olivia Niţiş, Aleksis Osmanis, Martina Pachmanová, Bojana Pejić, Piotr Piotrowski, Zora Rusinová, Angeli Sachs, Lydia Sklevicky, Věra Sokolová, Inga Šteimane, Maria Vassileva, Mirek Vodrážka
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, 2010
English, ca. 400 pages, 38 b/w illustrations
Symposium // Gender Check – Narratives and Exhibition Practices
Saturday, 20 November at 12 – 7.30 p.m. at MUMOK, Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna
Topics on the agenda will be the experiences and outcomes of the research project Gender Check, as well as the reception the exhibition received from the public and the media. To this end, exhibitions of a similar nature at international level will be examined in order to compare the various curatorial approaches and their implementation, as well as the exhibitions’ impact on the public. The objective is to develop new perspectives for Gender studies in the field of art.
Please find the detailed programme at www.gender-check.at
