Sesc Pompéia
Ana Mendieta
Pamela Castro
Oração contra os embustes [Prayer against scams], 2019
Regina José Galindo
Hasta borrar tu rastro [Until you erase your trace], 2023 Photograph of the artist's custom-made earth sculpture covered with lime
Laura Aguilar
Motion #58, 1999
Nature Self-Portrait #14, 1996
Nature Self-Portrait #5, 1996 pigment ink printing on archival paper
Laura Aguilar
Grounded #111, 2006-7
Untitled, Grounded series, 2006-7
pigment ink printing on archival paper
Laura Aguilar
Chican photographer - American of Mexican descent -, her thematic focus was urgent issues related to gender, sexuality, disability and beauty standards. With auditory dyslexia, the artist was self-taught (although she attended some photography courses), and was neglected by the art circuit for almost her entire life, only receiving her recognition posthumously.His work is a practice focused on artistic activism. Thus, in the succession of photographs present in this exhibition Nature Self-Portrait #5 and Nature Self Portrait #14, 1996; Motion #58, 1999; Grounded #111, 2006; and Untitled, 2007, we see, through naked bodies in the midst of nature, the latent questioning of ideas so incorporated into our culture about female identities, which have always been condemned, throughout the history of art, to the place of passive object of the male gaze. [T. F.]
Carolee Schneemann
Vulva’s Morphia, 1995Photo grid assembly of 36 panels with hand painting, wooden text inserts and fans
The work Vulva's Morphia (1995), by Carolee Schneemann, is composed of a grid with 36 different vulvic images - largely taken from iconographies of religions that worship goddesses -, four electric fans and strips of excerpts from her text Vulva's School. The subversive act of the artist's writing by personifying the Vulva - according to her binary and cisgender perspective - breaks the mistaken rhetorical trap that promotes ways to universalise the universalisation of gender in the field of biology, thus revealing the social practises that constitute the cisgender woman subject at a given moment of time. In Schneemann's panels, the artist states that:
Vulva reads biology and understands that it is an amalgam of proteins
and oxytocin that governs all your desires...
Vulva deciphers Lacan and Baudrillard and discovers that it is nothing
more than a sign, a meaning of emptiness, absence, that which is not
masculine... (give her a pen, so she can take notes...)
Vulva reads Masters and Johnson and understands that her vaginal
orgasms were not measured by any instrumentality and that she
should only experience clitoral orgasms...
Vulva recognises its symbols and names in graffiti under
railway viaducts: racha, pre-ciosa, pastel de pelo, perereca, felpuda,
periquita, boca de baixo...
Vulva gets naked, fills her mouth and pussy with paint brushes
and enters the Cedar Bar at midnight to scare the ghost of De
Kooning, Pollock, Kline...
Vulva decodes feminist constructivist semiotics and realises that she
has no authentic feeling; even her erotic sensations are built by
patriarchal projections, impositions and conditioning...
And it is important to emphasise that the theorist Thomas McEvilley, in his essay What You Did Do (1997), states that "the etymology of the title Vulva's Morphia (1995) dates back to the first declination of the Greek noun he morphe, designating form, shape, figure or, mainly, a beautiful form. According to Ovid, the god of sleep and dreams, Morpheus (from whose name our word "morphine") comes from, is so called because of all the ways he brings to mind when we sleep. Morphia seems to be a plu-ral neutral form, meaning something like "beautiful shapes" - dai 'Vulva Beautiful Forms' ['Beautiful shapes of vulva 1. (H. de P.]
Vulva reads biology and understands that it is an amalgam of proteins
and oxytocin that governs all your desires...
Vulva deciphers Lacan and Baudrillard and discovers that it is nothing
more than a sign, a meaning of emptiness, absence, that which is not
masculine... (give her a pen, so she can take notes...)
Vulva reads Masters and Johnson and understands that her vaginal
orgasms were not measured by any instrumentality and that she
should only experience clitoral orgasms...
Vulva recognises its symbols and names in graffiti under
railway viaducts: racha, pre-ciosa, pastel de pelo, perereca, felpuda,
periquita, boca de baixo...
Vulva gets naked, fills her mouth and pussy with paint brushes
and enters the Cedar Bar at midnight to scare the ghost of De
Kooning, Pollock, Kline...
Vulva decodes feminist constructivist semiotics and realises that she
has no authentic feeling; even her erotic sensations are built by
patriarchal projections, impositions and conditioning...
And it is important to emphasise that the theorist Thomas McEvilley, in his essay What You Did Do (1997), states that "the etymology of the title Vulva's Morphia (1995) dates back to the first declination of the Greek noun he morphe, designating form, shape, figure or, mainly, a beautiful form. According to Ovid, the god of sleep and dreams, Morpheus (from whose name our word "morphine") comes from, is so called because of all the ways he brings to mind when we sleep. Morphia seems to be a plu-ral neutral form, meaning something like "beautiful shapes" - dai 'Vulva Beautiful Forms' ['Beautiful shapes of vulva 1. (H. de P.]
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