Shadi Ghadirian
Qajar #42
2001, black & white digital prints, 60 x 90 cm.

Ghadirian made her Like Every Day Series after her marriage to fellow photographer, Peyman Hooshmand-zadeh. In this body of work, Ghadirian comments upon the daily repetitive routine to which many women find themselves consigned and by which many women are defined. Each of these color photographs depicts a figure draped in patterned fabric in place of the typical Iranian chador. However, instead of a face, each figure has a common household item such as an iron, a tea cup, a broom, a pot or a pan.

Her work is intimately linked to her identity as a Muslim woman living in Iran. Nonetheless, her art also deals with issues relevant to women living in other parts of the world. She questions the role of women in society and explores ideas of censorship, religion, modernity, and the status of women.

Shadi Ghadirian
“Nil Nil”
2008. Digital print, 30 x 30 in.

Amir Mobed
“Come Caress Me”
September 2010 performance at Azad Art Gallery, Tehran

Shocking performance at Art Gallery, inspired by Chris Burden, in which he stood in front of a target, wearing a bodysuit with a protective metal box over his head, and invited gallery visitors to shoot at him with a pellet gun. It was, he says, a symbolic execution with a message about freedom of speech and the hopes of artists of his generation being silenced.

Amir Mobed
“Come Caress Me”
September 2010 performance at Azad Art Gallery, Tehran

Amitis Motevalli
“Portrait of the Artist as a Rebel”
2005. Digital C-print, 20 x 13 1/2 in.

Mika Rottenberg’s immersive video installations address issues of gender and labor through outrageous narratives centered around real women (not actors or models) and their bodies. With her new video entitled Squeeze, Rottenberg collapses the humorous and the unsettling to examine global production in a 20-minute narrative that screens on a continuous loop at SFMOMA. Splicing together documentary footage from a rubber plant in India and a lettuce farm in Arizona with her own narrative of women in an absurdist makeup factory, Rottenberg’s surreal video homes in on the social realities of women’s labor.

In the makeup factory the blush source (the blond woman, dressed in an alluring outfit) is literally squeezed by walls for profit. Meanwhile, a nozzle from the wall of bare asses sprays water, and an obese woman spins on a circular floor — all to ensure that the priceless block of lettuce-rubber-blush is made to perfection.

“This piece, which is trying to collapse these geographically distant places into one space, is a natural step for me,” Rottenberg says. “It’s about using your body and being alienated from your body, objectifying your body and using it almost like a factory that can produce stuff. I feel like that’s very feminine. I’m interested in how selling one’s body can be empowering.”

Mika Rottenberg
Still: Squeeze, 2010

Maya Deren (American, 1917–1961) was a visionary of American experimental film in the 1940s and 1950s. A precocious student, she studied poetry and literature at New York University and Smith College, where she became interested in the arts. While working for modern-dance choreographer Katherine Dunham, Deren met her future husband, filmmaker Alexander Hammid, who introduced her to European avant-garde film. In 1943, the couple collaborated on the short film Meshes of the Afternoon, which has since become one of the most widely influential films of the American experimental-film movement.

Deren, who received the first Guggenheim Foundation grant for “creative work in the field of motion pictures” and formed the Creative Film Foundation to broaden support for experimental film, continued making and self-distributing her own films and lecturing and writing about avant-garde cinema theory until her untimely death at the age of forty-four. Her pioneering formal innovations—performing in front of the camera, using semiautobiographical content, and meshing literary, psychological, and ethnographic disciplines with rigorous technique—inspired future generations of experimental filmmakers.

This exhibition, which consists of a video installation in the Theater Galleries and short-film programs in the theaters, examines Deren’s legacy through both her own work and that of a trio of women directors upon whom she had an indelible influence: Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and Su Friedrich.

elles@centrepompidou is the third thematic exhibition of the National Modern Art Museum’s collections, following Big Bang in 2005 and the Mouvement des Images (Image Movements) in 2006-2007.

This will be the occasion for the institution, which has built up the very first collection of modern and contemporary art, to show its commitment to women artists, nationality and discipline taken together, and place them at the core of modern and contemporary art of the 20th and 21st centuries.

EXHIBITION ITINERARY

The show is hung in chronological order by themes. It brings together a selection of over 500 works by more than 200 artists, from the beginning of the 20th century up to the present day.

Pioneer
Level 5. Abstract, primitive, functional, urban, mixed media, surreal, amazons, objective… Eight rooms display the works of these pioneers who were at the forefront of change in all the artistic media: Shirley Jaffe, Joan Mitchell, Sonia Delaunay, Natalia S. Gontcharova, Hannah Höch, Frida Kahlo, Judit Reigl, Suzanne Valadon, Diane Arbus, Dora Maar.

Free Fire
Opening level 4. Niki de Saint Phalle, Karen Knorr, Rosemarie Trocket, among others, represent those who played historic roles, feminists, critics, photographers and performers, with their personal visions of reality.

Body slogan
Level 4. Precocious and inventive in photography and video, women artists have lately transformed the art of drawing, revitalising the very notion of body. ORLAN, Atsuko Tanaka and Ana Mendieta worked on the representation of the body and its stereotypes, notably that of the life drawing genre, as well as ways of staging it in their early performances.

The Activist Body
Level 4. Women artists played a key role in redefining visual and theoretical categories, and explored and commented on ways of bridging the abstract and the figurative, the organic and the systematic, the conceptual and the sensual. Typical among these was Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin, Vera Molnar, Valérie Jouve, Hanne Darboven.

A room of One’s Own
Level 4.Borrowing Virginia Wool’s title of her book dealing with questions about the conditions of art production, this part of the exhibition is gathering the works of artists exploring the notion of private space, weaving new connections between mental projections and exhibition space. Here we find Dorothea Tanning, Tatiana Trouvé, Charlotte Perriand, Sophie Calle.

Wordworks
Level 4. From story-telling to listing, through autobiography, quotations, legends and the many facets of the artist’s book, creative women like Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Natacha Lesueur, Cristina Iglesias, Eija-Liisa Ahtila explore the various uses of language in art. Concept Art, urban myths, appropriation and post-modernism all use words as a medium while video installations redefine the idea of story-telling.

Immaterials
Level 4. Matali Crasset, Alisa Andrasek, Tacita Dean, Louise Campbell, Isa Genzken, Nancy Wilson-Pajic, Geneviève Asse and more leave us with one of the most striking characteristics of contemporary art, namely its disembodiment. The title refers back to one of the Centre Pompidou’s cult exhibitions, “Les immatériaux” (Immaterials).

Centre Pompidou