Woman at the Crossroads of Ideologies

11 January 2007

On Saturday, January 20, 2007, the Croatian Association of Painters � Split opens an exhibition to mark the start of a one-month programme Woman at the Crossroads of Ideologies, prepared by Ana Peraica. The programme includes exhibitions, film and video screenings, mini-symposium, round-table discussions and the opening of the first women reading room.

According to Ana Peraica, this is primarily a cultural, not exhibition project. From the point of view of cultural production, this is more of a popular, rather than elite arts project.

The women make up one half, maybe even more than a half of the total population of the planet, and yet they are reduced to inanimate objects in the world�s museums � naked bodies. Guerilla girls started a provocation when they asked - Do women have to be naked to enter a museum?

That is how arts viewed women for centuries. Among the authors listed in official art history, there are but a handful of women. Add here the exclusion of handiworks (sewing, knitting, embroidery, etc.) from arts history � apart from those created by men � and the problems created by the thesis that video is primarily a female art from. We could continue this story in as many directions as you like.

Once the decoding starts, it becomes clear that art history, that most male and elite � the most white of all histories, while we are at it � doesn�t offer much coverage to works created by at least half of the population of the planet.

The project, therefore, could be reduced to a collection of nudes painted by men, a legitimate project of the classical art history. Or it could have been a collection of female works rebelling against men, in the style preferred by the 1980�s feminism. These approaches, however, were rather too predictable.

Instead, the project chose to present insight into the disciplines reformed under the criticism of cultural analysis, offering much more precise approach, devoid of women�s heritage as mere object; psychoanalysis, film and media studies, ethnology, sociology, political sciences and theology, even archaeology. Outside the realm of humanities, there is the genetics, too.

Such a program needs brave and courageous institutions that won�t fear the challenge presented by the interdisciplinary approach. In a country that has no interdisciplinary studies, it is quite logical, albeit strange, for such project to the carried out by an arts society. Also, we should note the good will on the behalf of participants who seemingly could hardly wait for such a project to come around.