Gender heart
8 november 2014 – 11 january 2015
Gender Heart is an exhibition investigating gender norms, identity, culture, religion, sex and human relations. The exhibition shows artists that relate to gender norms differently and how they affect our lives and bodies. For example, we live in a society that approves and expresses the importance of everyone’s equal value. Yet we wonder if that is true; how do we handle the idea of diversity and quality? This exhibition shows the unique ways that these questions can be asked in many ways.
The artists examine masculinity rules, how it shapes the male body, the relation between subject and object, and the border between the natural and the artificial. There are many layers to the connections between species, nature, gender, sexuality, and awareness. Who is allowed to be human and on who’s terms?
This exhibition is curated by Galleri Syster: Sara Edström, Anja Örn and Therese Engström.
As part of the exhibition, Havremagasinet hosted the seminar “Varandra I Andra” with the lecturers Lisa Gålmark, Camilla Flodin and Helena Pedersen. The conference had David Vikgren as curator.
More information can be found in the Folder (available only in Swedish).
Participating Artists
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen. Born 1970 in Manila, Philippines. Based in Copenhagen, Denmark. She works primarily with performance to explore various issues such as gender, identity, socio-cultural relations in different contexts and questions of home and belonging. Her work explores how the self is constructed, pinpointing the inherent differences in male/female role-play. Rasmussen’s productions often involve scripted texts and songs, composed music, choreography and precisely articulated visual elements such as specially designed costumes.
Klaudia Stoll. Born 1968 in Rastatt, Germany. She lives and works in Saarbrücken and Berlin. She describes her art practice as “Always playing! Cross over!” her work revolves around questions about identity, physicalness and being and evolves from the things she experiences, from something she is feeling, and things that concern her in one way or another.
Julia Bondesson. Born 1983 in Kinnared, Halland. Lives and works in Stockholm and Killeberg. Bondesson’s artistic base is in sculpture. She works with the body as a reference and her presence and responsiveness to the material she works affects the sculptures’ form. The movement in the sculptures and the surrounding environment becomes essential and she places them in a context to depict the topic with which she works.
Tamara de Laval. Born 1951 in Stockholm. Lives and works in Malmö and in Karstorpsvik, Östergötland. Tamara became a painter because she felt that visual grammar is an entity of its own, a language she commands better than the written language. She elaborates with the help of literary analogies: like poetry, her pictures and narratives are often more abstract in their expression. Or they can be like a philosophical text, alternating between dense to clear depending on what she wants to pass on and express.
Elias Björn. Born 1979 in Lund. He lives and works in Malmö. Elias works intuitively, investigative, and slowly. Personal feelings and experiences are central to his works, and his questions concern the human identity and, more specifically, masculinity. How and why is masculinity defined as it is? What is the extent of self-autonomy over our ego informing our personalities and our own identity? What choices do people make and why? Elias’s starting point in his art is often his own body – as inspiration and material.
Kristina Abelli Elander. She was born in 1952 in Stockholm, where she lives and works. Kristina’s artistic work often begins with the idea that develops in a long process. She wants to wait as long as possible with her decision on the actual presentation, which can easily lead to slight stress, uncertainty and tension, to which she exposes herself to avoid the opportunities that may arise along the road.
Adriana Salazar. Born in 1980 in Bogotá, Colombia. She lives and works in Mexico City.
Jill Peters. Born in 1968 in Miami. Lives and works in Miami and New York. Peters is a portrait photographer working on long-term documentary photography projects. Her emphasis is on human identity. Her current area of exploration is gender and how it relates to culture and tradition.
Tejal Shah. Born 1979 in Bhilai, Chattisgarh, India. Lives and works in Goa, India. Shah’s art practice incorporates everything and anything, including video, photography, performance, food, drawing, sound, installation and modes of sustainable living. Experiencing their works entails entering alter-curious worlds riddled with fact, fiction, poetry and mythology, which compel us to engage with layered propositions on the relationships between interspecies, ecology, gender, and post-porn, sexuality and consciousness.
Museum Anna Nordlanders collections. Elisabeth Barnekow (1874 – 1942) Ida Thoresen (1863 – 1937). The Association of Swedish Female Artists was founded in 1910 to enable female artists together to assert their rights as artists and women. The association, among other things, arranged exhibitions in Copenhagen, Vienna, and Paris. The artists and lifelong friends Elisabeth Barnekow and Ida Thoresen were long-time active members of the association’s board.
