About art and feminisms
Andreas Beitin, the director of the kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, spent three and a half years together with his two fellow curators preparing the exhibition in kunstmuseum Wolfsburg:
Empowerment (September 10, 2022 – January 08, 2023).
“In Germany, we still have the gender pay gap, i.e. the unequal payment of women and men for the same work up to to extreme forms of violence against women. Around 100,000 so-called femicides take place every year. It is therefore very urgent and important to present an exhibition that shows how artists all over the world deal with these challenges and translate them into art .”
116 art works are exhibited, by which one would like to seek a way out of social structures. They are arranged in a total of seven subject categories. From normative understanding of roles, beauty and sexuality beyond established ideals, to abuse and femicide, to the questions: what future should there be for women in times of climate change and pandemics? Do they capture different perspectives and feminist issues?
The exhibition can be a bit overwhelming due to its scope, the director also admits. He firmly dismisses the fact that the topic could be a bit trite by now:
“Of course it was clear to us that there had already been a lot of exhibitions on this topic, but basically they only have feminist art from the 60s and 70s shown and our exhibition goes well beyond that and shows very current positions from the last 20 years. And we just now had two very terrible cases where attacks were carried out on trans people, one attack even resulting in death. And that will also happen Yes, the theme of this exhibition is that this exclusion, this marginalization of people, must come to an end.”
