HerSelves

Dates: 14.12.16 – 26.02.17

Location:
Blueproject Foundation – Sala Project

Curators:

Aurélien Le Genissel
Renato Della Poeta
Pedro Torres
Laura Olea
Cristina López Morcuende

Artists:
Florencia Aliberti
Itziar Barrio
Cara Benedetto
Eliza Bennett
Arvida Byström & Maja Malou Lyse
Kelli Connell
Alba Feito
Núria Gómez Gabriel
Frances Goodman
Joana Kohen
Dina Litovsky
Sarah Maple
Sandra March
Camille Moravia
Verónica Navas Ramírez
Alyson Provax
Sophia Wallace

Catalogue here

The Blueproject Foundation presents “HerSelves”, the first collective exhibition held in the Sala Project, which will be on show from the December 14th 2016 to February 26th 2017.

The exhibition, curated by the Foundation’s creative team (Renato Della Poeta, Aurélien Le Genissel, Pedro Torres, Laura Olea and Cristina López Morcuende), investigates the female figure in contemporary society. Through a diverse and multiple cast of feminine voices and outlooks, the exhibition reflects upon what it means to think the position of women beyond the mere alterity within which traditional hegemonic discourse has confined it. Drawing upon their own personal experience, the artists reunited question cultural, social, private or symbolic features related to the female figure and its issues of representation, identity, liberation, intimacy, desire or perception.

“HerSelves” is woven as a multiple symphony in which women artists talk about women, reclaiming their often absent voice to denounce, criticize and build their own message. Language and image, intimacy and provocation are means to transform the personal into political, the particular into collective, the casual into meaningful. These complementary, divergent or parallel discourses fuel, criticize or deconstruct that elusive construction of the collective imaginary which we call female identity.

The title of the exhibition is a reference to an interview held in 1975 by Julia Kristeva, titled “Unes Femmes” (published in Les Cahiers du GRIF), in which the renowned philosopher highlighted that “the fact that we can generalize the female condition should only encourage each woman to express her own individuality”. The aim of the exhibition is to draw near to such personal individualities, within an undeniable historical and social legacy, gathering women who assert their own personal aspirations and creations.

A semantic and lexical game whose tension revolves, on the one hand, around the female discourse conceived as an alterity to male domination and, on the other hand, around the dissolution of boundaries which allows for an equalitarian and universal vision. A statement which may avoid falling into an unnatural assimilation or an ostentatious idolisation. Far from pretending to encompass the endless variety of outlooks of contemporary female voices, this new exhibition held in the Sala Project presents a fight and reflection all the more actual and necessary.

Curatorial text and program