Gender Check | Virtual discussion

This autumn, Kaunas Artists’ House invites you to look back on the 1990s – a period of social, political and cultural changes in Lithuania and the world – and presents a project and a series of events called Obscene West. In Honey dedicated to female artists who were actively creating at that time.

On November 16, 6 p.m. (EET) / 5 p.m. (CET) the series will continue with an online discussion that will review Gender Check, one of the most significant exhibitions in the world of European art in recent decades, presenting artists from the former Soviet Bloc countries to the audience of Vienna and Europe in general.

The discussion will be attended by the internationally acclaimed curator of the exhibition Bojana Pejić (Serbia/Berlin) and cultural critic and art historian Katrin Kivimaa (Estonia), who acted as a researcher in the context of the exhibition. The discussion will be moderated by art critic, artist and writer Laima Kreivytė, who also contributed to the initiation of the exhibition and participated in it as a curator.

In 2007, The ERSTE Foundation and PATTERNS (Cosmin Costinas, Veronica Kaup-Hasler, Piotr Piotrowski and Georg Schöllhammer) invited seven curators from different countries to work together on an idea to mark the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the so-called Iron Curtain. Of all the proposals submitted, the project by Bojana Petić was chosen. It is an exhibition that looked at the changing gender roles in Eastern European art from the 1970s to the present day. It required extensive international research. In preparing the exhibition, twenty-five art historians and critics explored archives, museums, libraries, artists’ legacies and exhibition catalogs in 24 countries including Lithuania, Bulgaria, Armenia, and the former German Democratic Republic.

Gender Check exhibition, shown at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna from November 2009 until February 2010, became the first comprehensive presentation of the Eastern European art of the second half of the twentieth century that was focused on gender roles. The exhibition featured more than 200 artists and 400 works – paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs, posters, films, and videos – revealing the change in gender representation, with a special emphasis on their change in different socio-political contexts. With these works Gender Check introduced a hitherto little-known chapter in art history and created a medium for change in contemporary gender role discourse.

The context of this exhibition will be used in the discussion in order to respond to and compare the issues relevant in art at that time and today, using curatorial and artistic strategies, feminist practices.

More information about the exhibition: http://gender-check.erstestiftung.net/…/how-gender…

The event will be held in English and streamed via Kaunas Artists’ House Facebook page.

The event is co-hosted and will be streamed by regional art and feminist organisations: Echo Gone Wrong and Feministeerium.

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The project, named after Eglė Rakauskaitė’s performance/video installation Meduje (in honey) made in 1996, will analyze the issues of gender roles and sexuality in the changing 1990s, examine the manifestations of feminist movements in Lithuanian art as well as the other post-Soviet countries.

The project is organised by Kaunas Artists’ House.

The project is funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.

The project is curated by Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė and Edvinas Grinkevičius

Project design: Studio Cryo