Carla Cruz

AMIW was initiated in 2005 by the artist Carla Cruz to expound the question of gender and to question power relations in the arts. It wants to affirm itself as a political platform; to let go of the desire of belonging to a discriminatory art world in an attempt to figure out new ways of giving account of hu’wo’man art production.

At the VBKÖ AMIW asks together with the ‘3 Marias’ (Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta, Maria Velho da Costa): “Sisters. What can [art] do? Rather, what can words do?” AMIW thus refers to the conscious “New Portuguese Letters” that addressed the age-old oppression of Portuguese woman and provoked, in 1972, during the Salazar/Caetano dictatorship, the biggest literary scandal of Portugal.

The exhibition shows works by the artists André Alves, Catarina Carneiro de Sousa and Sameiro Oliveira Martins, Laura García and Said Dokins, Alice Geirinhas, Risk Hazekamp, Roberta Lima, Ana Pérez-Quiroga, Suzanne van Rossenberg, Ângelo Ferreira de Sousa, Yan María Yaoyólotl, and performances by André Alves, Stefanie Seibold and the duo Projecto Gentileza.

Moreover, visitors will have access to a documentary presentation of AMIW – 2005/10. In addition at the VBKÖ there will be a video lounge, with: Miguel Bonneville, Mónica Faria, Risk Hazekamp, Anna Jonsson, Cristina Mateus, Rita Rainho, Flávio Rodrigues, Evelin Stermitz and Lenka Vráblíková.

(for more information about the participants)

The exhibitors take passion as excuse for engaging the world. At the core of their works they intends to question how the desire for visibility can be transmuted into a different experience one of equality and accountability as to evoke a feminist practices that functions as a ‘counter-hegemonic intervention’ in the arts in particular and in society in general?

OPENING: November 3rd, 2011, 7pm with the performances:

“A READER” by Stefanie Seibold

The very way in which “A READER” is constructed activates its performative energies. The pin-board becomes a poster made of images, which can be read like an image-atlas – a visual archive which not only stores and collects, but which also activates its elements and connects them.

“Biting Song” by the duo Projecto Gentileza

“Biting Song” is a concert/performance “on the relation of perception and physicality, reflecting on suppression and existence in a state of permanence around abstract mental places.”

The Exhibition is accompanied by a series of EVENTS:

November 4
5 – 7pm:
Collective activity “The Embroidered Digital Commons”

A project by Ele Carpenter, moderated by Carla Cruz, is an internationally distributed embroidery of the text ‘A Concise Lexicon of/for the Digital Commons’ written by the Raqs Media Collective (2003).

November 5
11am – 12am:
How can AMIW be, simultaneously, an exhibition and a platform for relationality?

Presentation of the publication: AMIW: New Portuguese Letters with Carla Cruz and Filipa Alves

12.15am –1pm
Performance “Deprived meanings” by André Alves

The performance is interested in the translation of the tension between the will to say/act and the capacity to do so.

1.15 –2.30pm
How can the desire for visibility be transmuted into a different experience of equality and accountability?

A round table on the importance of the arts to convey feminist struggles and on strategies from a feminist and antiracist perspective, based on equality and responsibility, that intervene in the dominant discourses in the arts and society.

With an editor of „Migrationsskizzen“ (2010), Stefanie Grünangerl (collaborator of grassrootsfeminism.net) and Lisa Bolyos (feminist and anti-racist activist and artist).

http://amiw-vbkoe.blogspot.com/

AUSSTELLUNGSDAUER/EXHIBITION DURATION: 4. November – 3. Dezember 2011

ÖFFNUNGSZEITEN/OPENING HOURS:
SAMSTAGS/SATURDAYS 12., 19., 26. November, 3. Dezember, 16 – 19h
FREITAGS/FRIDAYS (nur nach telefonischer Vereinbarung/by Arrangement: +43-0-680 238 4887, 11.,
18., 25. November, 2. Dezember, 17 – 19h

Vereinigung bildender Künstlerinnen Österreichs – VBKÖ
Austrian Association of Women Artists
Maysedergasse 2 (4. Stock)
1010 Wien/Vienna
Tel: +43-1-513 64 73
www.vbkoe.org
vbkoe@vbkoe.org

very soon miss’opo will be opening its doors, and my floor piece will be revealed.

Exhibition: 22- 23 September

RHB:312 (Research Architecture)

Goldsmiths, University of London

I am looking for new understandings of democracy in art practices and new productions of subjectivity for the parties (beings/things) involved: the role of the artist, its function in the respective projects and the different modes of ‘relationality’ with either engaged or removed ‘publics’.

“Many of my projects start by reading, taking notes, looking for specific imagery online and drawing. Most of these first imagery will never leave the studio, and is to be transformed, so it doesn’t really matter so much which materials are being used, normally is just stuff lying around. In the case of the drawings (State Drawings) there was a pad of quite thin paper that I bought on a college sale, so I use that, and yellow pencils. There are always yellow pencils lying around. I got the habit of drawing in yellow from a project I have done in 2004 (Blood 4Oil) where I would first draw in yellow and then fill the figures with India Ink, the underlying drawing became consequently quite invisible. At some point (Again about State Drawings) I attempted to reproduce them in better quality paper, but they just lost the sketchy quality of the first ones. The thinness of the paper was also quite useful in the process, and that could not be repeated in a thicker paper. I made some other models in plasticine, but then again, they don’t add much more for me to the constructions already made in the drawings themselves, (pause) even though two-dimensional they reproduce ideal three-dimensional shapes. (long pause) I don’t know to which extent they (State Drawings) became the thing itself.”

(notes from ‘Claire Smith in conversation with Carla Cruz’)

September 22: 3pm-8pm

September 23: 11am-1pm

Goldsmiths – Lewisham Way – New Cross SE14 6NW

RHB 312 = Richard Hoggart Buidling, 3rd Floor