Invisible Goddess
Screening programme
Artists: Aleksandra Karpowicz, Katarzyna Perlak, Lena Maria Thüring, Maxima Smith and Ruth Patir
Curated by: Kasia Sobucka and Ameli M. Klein
Magazzino Gallery, Palazzo Contarini Polignac
Dorsoduro 878, 30123 Venice
24 - 27th November 2022 at 14.00 - 20.00
SCHEDULE
Thursday 24th November 19.00 - opening reception
Saturday 26th November 13.00-14.00 - brunch with artists
The screening programme Invisible Goddess brings together works by five women artists and filmmakers. Goddess, as an emblem of power free to exist beyond the narrow limits of society, initiates a conversation on the invisibility of emotional labour.
Each story explores feminine spirit, love, fertility, labour, nature and myth, and often uses the female body as a vessel to do so. Working at the intersection of art, feminism and cinema, Invisible Goddess gives voice to women artists. Addresses their rights and identities, visible in their work and beyond. Artists look at identity, empathy and solidarity as tools for the individual and collective agency in an ever more unsettled world. By evoking the paradox of the goddess as a plentiful, fertile, and giving deity that can be found within most spiritual narratives, we question the current expectation of gendered labour, which is often founded on such archetypes. What do we strive for in our depiction of femininity, and how has a historic confirmation bias created a causality loop from which it is seemingly impossible for contemporary feminist thought to escape.
Lyrical wonder, a variety of selves, spirituality and ancient figures meet with modern-day landscapes in this intimate screening that includes: School Reading by Aleksandra Karpowicz, Broken Hearts Hotel by Katarzyna Perlak, Down the River by Lena Maria Thüring, Portrait of the artist as a Daughter by Maxima Smith and Marry, Fuck, Kill by Ruth Patir, alongside performances and discussions with the artists.
SCREENING PROGRAMME
School Reading by Aleksandra Karpowicz, 2021
School Reading is a direct response to Poland’s restrictions on sexual health education and abortion rights. Drawing parallels to her personal experience of a childhood in a conservative Catholic country, Karpowicz exposes flaws in her native country as well as comments on the damaging effects of ideology-driven education on the younger generation.
Broken Hearts Hotel by Katarzyna Perlak, 2021
Broken Hearts Hotel explores the potential of the "love hotel" as a temporary, utopian non-space in which we can reinvent love, relationships and ourselves, and holds tender correspondences filled with love, longing, desire, sorrow and heartbreak. Broken Hearts Hotel was premiered at a public online screening and conversation with critic, art historian and curator Pawel Leszkowicz, which followed two days of one-on-one virtual encounters with the artist, during which participants could choose to overshare broken heart histories, take an intimacy quiz, dance across the screen, or listen to a bedtime love story read just for them.
Down the River by Lena Maria Thüring, 2022
Thüring has created a multi-layered multimedia work based on the artist's research into the contemporary mechanisms of marginalization of women* and the Bergell witch trials of the 16th to 18th centuries. In Down the River, image and sound levels are interwoven in collaboration with the Bergell choir to create an essayistic film that also addresses questions of possible empowerment.
Portrait of the artist as a Daughter by Maxima Smith, 2018
Portrait of the Artist as a Daughter, begins in a picturesque bathroom, as you watch a mother wash her daughter’s hair in silence. As the film goes on the camera gently zooms out to reveal it is a set. The illusion is shattered, it becomes a stage and the women are performing their roles. This piece oscillates between two spaces: an intimate moment and a staged performance.
Petah Tikva by Ruth Patir, 2020
Petah Tikva is a 3D video work set inside the waiting room of the fertility clinic at the hospital of the city of Petach Tikvah. Here, 3000-year-old figurines of Canaanite fertility deities fill the room waiting for their allotted appointments. As the deities wait their turn in the clinic and ponder their discharge, TV screens broadcast the news: wild animals - also Canaanite figurines digitally animated – are invading urban spaces or major cities. Through the animation of these figurines, which are part of the Archaeology Wing or the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Patir creates a poignant mediation on the various forms of invasion we experience in contemporary reality.
ARTISTS BIO
Aleksandra Karpowicz is an award-winning artist based in London, working with video, photography, and performance. In her art she explores themes of relationship to body, psychology, sexuality, and identity, and how those aspects of human nature are expressed and oppressed in our society and politics. A great diversity of over 600 people from a range of social backgrounds, genders, sexuality, and ages appear in her work. She often performs and models for her own art, exposing struggles and personal journeys of healing. She sees her art as an empowering platform of expression for herself and the communities she works with.
Katarzyna Perlak is a Polish born artist, based in London who works in moving image, performance, sound, textiles and installation. Her work is driven by politics and feelings examining queer subjectivities, migration and the potentiality of affect as a tool for registering and archiving both present, continuous and past historical moments. Her background is in Philosophy, which she studied in Poland, and Fine Art Media which she studied at Camberwell College of Arts (2008) and Slade School of Fine Art (2017). Her films have been shown widely at film festivals across Europe and she was part of Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2017. She has exhibited internationally, including: Young Curators New Ideas V, Detroit Art Week, Detroit; I was, but just awake, Art Night, London (2019); Tighten Throat and Butterflies, Metal, Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool (2018); A Day of Learning, Diaspora Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale, Venice (2017) and Remote Intimacies, Leslie – Lohman Museum of Arts, New York & ONE Archives, Los Angeles, (2021).
Lena Maria Thüring was born in Basel in 1981 and lives and works between Zurich and Basel. In 2014, she graduated from Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). Recent solo exhibitions include at Centre Culturel Suisse (Paris, 2019); Kunstmuseum PROGR (Bern, 2015) and Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Basel, 2013). In addition, she has participated in numerous group shows, such as at Kunsthalle Basel (2019); Kunstmuseum Thun (2019); Museum Langmatt (Baden, 2019); Kunsthaus Baselland (2016); and screenings at Haus der Kulturen (Berlin, 2013); Reina Sofia (Madrid, 2010) and Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2012). Thüring has received several awards, including Werkstipendium Landis & Gyr Stiftung (2022), Werkjahr Zurich (2019); Werkbeitrag, Kunstkredit Basel-Stadt (2018); Werkbeiträge Zurich (2011, 2016); Basel Manor Art Prize (2013) and Kiefer Hablitzel (2009, 2011). Since 2014, she has held a teaching position at Institut Kunst, FHNW/HGK Basel.
Maxima Smith (b. 1992, London UK) lives and works in South East London. Smith works predominantly with moving image which allows her to emphasise and focus on the rhythmic and meditative qualities which reappear throughout her work. A number of recent works have focussed on the mechanics and techniques that create the illusions of cinema and theatre. Smith situates much of her work in the blurred boundary between ‘the set’, and ‘real life,’ where questions arise of how we all act and perform ourselves. Smith is currently studying an MA in Fine Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute. Recent selected exhibitions include Visions in the Nunnery (Webb-Ellis), The Nunnery Gallery, London, (2022); The Window Part 1: Ode to a Window Cleaner, The Clarence, London, (2021) (solo); Visions in the Nunnery (Hetain Patel), The Nunnery Gallery, London (2020); Re-enchanted Matter, APT Gallery, London (2020); To all our absent dialogues, 155a Gallery, London (2020); Pixelache2019 Oranssi, Helsinki, (2019); Puppet Portraits, The French House, London (2019) (solo); Ode to a Window Cleaner, The People's Palace, London (2019) (solo); Visions in the Nunnery (Tina Keane), The Nunnery Gallery, London (2019); Malevolent Eldritch Shrieking, Attercliffe, Sheffield (2018); Two Glass Eyes Are Better Than One, Thames-Side Studios, London (2018).
Ruth Patir (b. in 1984 in New York, USA) lives and works in Tel Aviv. Ruth Patir works with video, film, and performance in sequences that confuse the public and private spheres. Patir employs new technologies for rethinking narratives, contemplating gender paradigms and exploring the aesthetics of power. In 2018 Patir received the “Young Video Artist'' prize from the Ministry of culture and she is currently a member of the Artport Residency program sponsored by the Arison Foundation (2019-2020). In her latest solo exhibition “Love Letters to Ruth '' showcased at Hamidrasha Gallery (2018, Tel Aviv) Patir resurrected the late general Moshe Dayan and had him play her lover using 3D technologies. Her film “Sleepers” (2017) was awarded The Experimental Cinema and Video Art Award at the Jerusalem Film Festival. Patir’s work has been exhibited at venues such as CCA Center for Contemporary Art – Tel Aviv, Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Anthology Film Archives – New York, MoMA Museum of Modern Art – New York, Kav 16 Gallery – Tel Aviv, and Flux Factory New York among others. The artist holds a BFA from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design Jerusalem, and an MFA from Columbia University in the city of New YorkThe artist holds a BFA from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design Jerusalem, and an MFA from Columbia University in the city of New York.
This project is supported by Adam Mickiewicz Institute
