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Counting Thoughts is an interdisciplinary group show curated by Mayssa Fattouh that invites female artists of different nationalities to present works that reflect their thoughts on their own womanhood in a free context. Keeping in mind that the association to culturally specific shows comes with the burden of stereotypes, Counting Thoughts aims at taking an approach that goes beyond direct gender attribution.

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It is an attempt to open up a dialogue on the implications that this categorization has on the artist, curator and viewer when confronted with such a loaded and indefinable subject. Different medium are used such as video, animation, drawing, photography, sculpture and installation.

 

When I was invited to curate a show about women on women the first thought that came to my mind was the load of stereotyped views that would accompany such an exhibition. Whether the culturally specific creations have encouraged these views or not, an exhibit focusing on female artists examining the concept of gender, specifically their own, will inevitably bring up those pre-conceived notions.

 

However, this hasn’t stopped curators and artists across the world from continuing to explore this subject countless times over- In fact the concept of gender plays a deep role in our identity and has increasingly become the focus of academic research in both art and social studies - and has been revisited in different contexts, be it political, social or cultural. A text by curator Britta Schmitz accompanying the artist Shirin Neshat’s exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin in 2005, serves as a good example of some of the current thinking around this topic.

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The approach taken in the interdisciplinary group show, Counting Thoughts, is to present works by nine female artists treating the subject of womanhood as something natural, inherent and private. The exhibition as a whole avoids lapsing into one specific context, bringing various aspects together.

 

Bearing in mind the various polemics circulating around this subject, the show attempts to open up a dialogue on the implications that this categorisation has on the artist, curator and viewer when confronted with such a loaded and indefinable subject.

The selection of artists was based on the underlying treatment of womanhood as a subject, thus making the link between each work a rather ambiguous one.

The viewer here is faced with the contextual uncertainty of the subject matter, giving space for each to interpret this process as a personal experience.

This experience is especially highlighted in Alexandra Hopf’s video work, entitled ... or should this be an unknown wall? The piece treats the artist’s fears and desires by way of superimposing personal archival images, which slowly and silently melt together leaving an impression of a lucid dream in the mind of the viewer.

The images here can be perceived as the reverse process of forgetting a latent memory while creating a world of psychological strain. Hopf’s main subjects of inspiration vary between philosophy and psychoanalysis, the real and the myth, politics and nature, in her use of various media and techniques.

In another video work, Perdu/Gagné, Sirine Fattouh gives voice to Lebanese women from various socio- cultural backgrounds and geographical areas to answer two questions « What did you win? » and « What did you lose? » while referring to the background of the artist as a Lebanese woman exiled from her country.

The outcome of the interviews reveals a poignant reality in which these women have lived in the midst of disastrous political situations. In her multidisciplinary works, Fattouh's approach is constantly tied to the issue of the artist's responsibility to highlight political and social conflicts.

From a socio-political approach, Iz Oztat tests taboos of Turkish society in her animation, Sisters. Oztat tackles the modernisation of the Turkish republic and the Islamist movement, placing women at the forefront of their discourses. The animation shows two Şah-ı Maran (Queen of Snakes) - one with a decorative headgear, the other one with a headscarf - moving through a public space, marked bysymbols of power, religion and Islamic mythology. In Sisters both women move away from their assigned genders by displaying physical love for each other; the kissing act is done whilst holding the audience as an accomplice. A portrait photograph of Oztat taking the reverse pose with artist and writer Claude Cahun illustrates the theoretical influence that the former had on the artist, which led her to develop the concept of the animation.

 

Moving from theoretical processes to a more physical approach, Rasha Kahil’s self-portrait photography diptych, “Insomnia is a 4-letter Word represents the female body in an internal struggle, dislocated, dismembered, offering itself to the gaze of an audience of peers. The reader plays a primordial part in this questioning and is left to fill in the blanks by responding to this self-sacrificial body. It personifies the waves created by the clash of the conscious and the unconscious, reason and instinct that are the pinball identities of the self as woman, as artist, as social being”, states the artist. In her other photographic piece, Laurie stands alone akin to a naked baroque portrait alluding to the concept of “the woman as a sight” which John Berger refers to in Ways of Seeing. The look of the young woman is striking in her purity and sincerity; it provokes the viewer to raise questions on how we want to engage with this portrait and is almost a highlight of the nakedness vs. the nude of the female body representation in art.

 

In a more drastic approach, Nastia Bolchakova pushes physical deconstruction even further by recreating pieces of steak and women breast moulds laid on plastic trays in the manner of consumer products as a direct offering from the artist to the audience. Bolchakova’s artistic activity is inseparable from her life and womanhood and is integrated as a compelling platform: “my body, my voice, my formal universe, my social status are those of a woman, therefore if I want to work from that, my sex is bound to be identifiable” states the artist.

With much provocation and sarcasm, Emi Miyashita’s Welcome To My Room, a series of micro-scale pencil drawings, depict the domestic space of a woman, built on sexual fantasies. The artist’s exploration of child psychotherapy is deeply tied to psycho-analytical theories on childhood and relentlessly refers back to the duality of being a grown woman while belonging to the world of a child.

The artist invites the audience to literally take a closer look at her life by placing magnifying glasses as part of her installation; the viewer is trapped in a vicious act of voyeurism leading to a direct engagement with the work itself. A recurrent approach seems to be deconstruction by way of reconstructing another form of expression. In the sculpture Colcha (Bedspread) by Marcela Astorga, the artist has plucked the red threads of a cover that has been in direct contact with her body insinuating the extraction of her blood and skin. She has then placed it on a firm and unalterable structure, giving it the role of the caretaker or healer.

Astorga’s main artistic influence relates to Arte Povera and its protagonists such as Michelangelo Pistoletto. She works primarily with skin considering it a medium of intimate communication for being the largest sensory organ in the body, the allusion to skin taps on large subjects such as violence, memory and identity.

Experimental material takes shape here in another sculpture by Veronica Brovall with her cradle-like piece I Was Here. The artist has chosen materials usually used for reshaping or rebuilding broken parts, such as plaster of Paris and melted asphalt strips to express the musings on her own existence. Other sculptures by Brovall are monumental pieces that take over a room and transforms its functionality while observing the viewer in relation to such mass.

In Give and Take, an installation of five red tree trunks with a large red monochrome drawing, Hiba Kalache represents a visual contrast between a set of familiar objects and other imaginary ones. For Kalache, “as humans, we function within a specific set of perimeters between the imaginary and the real, for emotional survival”, which is the momentum behind her creation of fantastic worlds. In the combination of her different practices she questions the “objecthood” of objects in our surroundings and redefines this term through form, volume, and color while raising questions on our relationship with these elements, and how they exist in relation to one another. For the past year, Kalache has been drawing exclusively with red, challenging the limitations of the use of monochromatic color. By doing this, she is constantly pushing its boundaries with the creation of a communicative platform between the different elements of her work.

 

From the various analyses on exhibitions addressing the Woman subject, one of the conclusions that most agree with is that good art is genderless and has no geographical boundaries. However it is necessary to point out that a relentless discourse continues to surge among critics and academics on the gender subject as part of the concept of “Collective Identities” - which appeared in the latter part of the 20th century to describe a characteristic feature of human interaction between individuals and collectivities – where the individual or group becomes a social object. Writer and philosophy professor, Kwame Anthony Appiah states in his book The Ethics of Identity "Identity is central to human existence. It is an essential source of our values" ; thus fiercely opposing criticism on its alleged uselessness as an analytic category.

 

The social object is the focal point from where I believe we continue to delve deeper into exploring the different perspectives of culturally specific. It is somehow through doing this that we are able to reach some form of understanding of the many emotional, social and, ultimately, human, layers which constitute our existence.

                                Mayssa Fattouh