Fiona Hall (Australian) – the environment, politics, war

    'Mourning Chorus', 2007 - 08, resin, plastic, vitrine

Curator’s Quote

Fiona Hall’s recent work Mourning Chorus (2007-08) refers to the demise of the once ‘deafening’ song of New Zealand’s bird fauna. This work brings together characteristic aspects of Hall’s practice; flora and fauna are represented by reworked found objects and an ironic reference is made to the museological practice of collecting specimens—species that were once seen in nature are now only seen dead in the museum.

Eleven extinct or endangered bird species are represented by disposable plastic chemical containers animated by carved and cast resin beaks. Bottles of toxic chemicals that eradicate insects, for example ‘Beetle and Grub Killer’ stand as a metaphor for the destruction of bird species and light up

randomly as though flickering to life. All this is visible through the delicate vinyl patterns of native New Zealand plant foliage, spread across the glass panels. The complex circuit of wires below the coffin connects the birds to the earth, as though allowing the toxic liquid to drain into the ground, causing further destruction.

Mourning Chorus is a work born out of Hall’s interest in the environment and humanity’s impact on it. During an artist residency in New Zealand in 2006, she began to research the politics of bird extinction. Describing New Zealand “like a silent island”5, Hall recalled reading an entry dated 6 February 1770 from the diary of Joseph Banks, “This morning I was awaked by the singing of the birds ashore... the numbers of them were certainly very great…their voices were certainly the

[most] melodious wild musick I have ever heard, almost imitating small bells but with

the most tuneable silver sound imaginable.” 6

The discrepancy between Banks’ description of New Zealand and her own formed the conceptual framework for this artwork.

Isabel Finch, 2008

Research Information

Many Australian and New Zealand bird and plant species have evolved from a common ancestry, with shared origins from the time when both lands were part of the ancient, southern super continent known as Gondwana. However the subsequent post- Gondwanan development of New Zealand fauna took a very different path: an absence of native mammals and snakes enabled the

continued evolution of unique bird species, many of them flightless and ground-nesting.

Waves of human migration over the past 900 years have disrupted this vulnerable ecosystem.

The introduction of predatory animals such as rats, stoats and weasels has devastated the populations of numerous species. Land-clearance and the arrival of other environmental competitors such as possums and rabbits have hammered more nails into the coffin of the demise of New Zealand’s birds. Of the eleven bird species represented in Mourning Chorus nine are extinct, and two, the Kakapo and the Little Spotted Kiwi, are extinct in their native habitats but undergoing breeding programs on several of New Zealand’s off-shore island sanctuaries which

have been cleared of vermin. A number of the birds and all of the tree species represented in Mourning Chorus are closely related through their Gondwanan ancestry to others native to Australia.

Fiona Hall, 2008

Text from: Fiona Hall Force Field exhibition at the MCA in 2008

Wangechi Mutu (African)- changing culture of African women

Wangechi Mutu (*1972), The Bride Who Married a Camel's Head, 2009

Snakes slither out of her Medusa’s head, which is adorned with mushrooms, shells, and pearls. In her hand, she is holding the mouth of a camel opened wide in a scream. With its strange marriages, Wangechi Mutu’s The Bride Who Married a Camel’s Head is typical for the work of the New York-based Kenyan artist: Mutu’s collages combine images from fashion, sports, and sex magazines to create hybrid, “exotic” creatures that are simultaneously human and animal, monster and machine. Mutu, who was Deutsche Bank’s first “Artist of the Year” in 2010, addresses issues of feminine identity in the fraught relationship between western culture and post-colonial history. At the same time, her collages explore the dreams and desires propagated by the global consumerist society and its effects: the ruthless exploitation of natural resources and a world in which the body has become a product.


Text from: http://dbcollection.db.com/en/artworks2010.html

Shirin Neshat (Iranian) - gender

Shirin Neshat is a leading contemporary artist. In her videos, films, and photographs she draws upon her Iranian heritage for inspiration and addresses the complexities of the contemporary Muslim world through visually arresting imagery.

According to popular understanding, soon after the establishment of Islam in the mid-seventh century, the jihad, or Holy War (as a means of enlarging Muslim territory), was outlined as one of the foremost duties of the believer. Women actively contributed to the expansion of Muslim territory and fought on the battlefield side by side with their male co-religionists (Ahmed 69-72). The Prophet Muhammad’s aunt Safiyah is reputedly the first Muslim woman to kill an enemy in battle. Another famed female soldier was Nusaybah bint Kaab, who in the Battle of Uhud shielded the Prophet from harm with her own body, thereby receiving thirteen wounds. In a later battle she even lost her hand, and the Prophet honoured her courage publicly. Further role models for later Muslim women include the Prophet’s politically conscious daughter Fatima, who as his sole surviving child and wife to his cousin and successor, Ali, kept Muhammad’s bloodline from dying out. Fatima’s and Ali’s daughter Zaynab holds a special place in the heart of Shia women. When the Sunni caliphs usurped power over the Muslim community after assassinating Ali, the rightful caliph, Zaynab and her brothers, Hassan and Hussayn, along with a group of followers traveled to Iraq to raise resistance there. In order to accompany her brothers, Zaynab divorced her husband. On the journey she took charge of the women and children. After their followers were massacred and she was taken prisoner at Karbala by the resistance-crushing army under Sunni command, she nursed the survivors. And she was the one to inform the Muslim community of the atrocities committed by speaking out publicly.

Zaynab became the heroine of Shiism and the role model that was deemed fit for Iranian women. Ali Shariati (1933-1977), an important ideologue and demagogue who was to Iran’s Islamic Revolution what Marx was to the Bolshevik Revolution, was instrumental in the promotion of this new Islamic ideal of Iranian womanhood. This new Iranian woman had to be politically conscious, religious, intellectually developed, strong, patient, and committed, militant and self-sacrificing, and yet at the same time loyal to her husband and family, compassionate, feminine, and modest in appearance (Reeves 121, 128). Thus, while women were considered inferior to men in daily life, they were seen as equal on the battlefield. Shariati’s ideal, epitomized by Zaynab, was emulated by many young militant women who donned the veil and fought as soldiers of Islam - they are even called “Zaynab commandos” (Reeves 128).

In the context of these powerful role models, it is not surprising that some girls begin to handle weapons at a tender age, much like the dolls and cooking utensils that can invariably be found in toy boxes elsewhere. These girls are likely to grow up to be volunteers joining the military training offered to female university students or to be a member of one of the underground guerrilla movements. Two examples of such movements are the Marxist People’s Fedayin and the Islamist-socialist People’s Mujahidin (both established 1965). Both previously fought against the Pahlavi and now against Khomeini’s regime, in a struggle for freedom and against the repression of opinion. Other groups welcoming volunteers are militant women’s organizations, such as the Society for Militant Women or the Militant Women’s Committee. Many women have chosen this extreme way of life, marked by bloodshed, violence, and tragedies, out of conviction for Islam and for justice. And it is exactly this conviction to the point of violence and self-sacrifice that was Neshat’s vantage point for her photographic series “Women of Allah” (Camhi 150).

Speechless (1996, above) is the title of a photograph consisting of Neshats portrait, cut off along the nose and overlaid with minute Calligraphy. Next to her cheek, at the height of her ear, a gun emerges from under the chador, pointed at the viewer so that one finds oneself staring at a gaping muzzle. Maybe it is not so much the woman portrayed who is speechless - if we pursue the argument that her voice is symbolized by the Persian text inscribed on her face - but the viewer who sees her/himself threatened by the gun. Although the gun conveys violence, at the same time its position also evokes an earring, an ornament enhancing feminine beauty. Neshat states, “The gun placed beside the woman’s cheek is at once a warning and an object of beauty. Both are divided in terms of their purpose - their combined statement is deliberately puzzling” (Goodman 53). However, the combination of a gun, an emblem of violence, with a woman’s face in such a way that the gun becomes an ornament seems less puzzling when we consider Ali Shariati’s notion of the ideal Iranian woman. He sees militancy and violent behaviour for the cause of Islam as a virtue, as an ornament, that grace and enhance her.

Text from: http://www.thirdspace.ca/journal/article/view/cichocki/161

Barbara Kruger (American) – Stereotypes of women in advertising

“I work with pictures and words
because they have the ability to
determine who we are and who we

aren’t” - Barbara Kruger


 First her signs address you with the use of pronouns, then they entertain you with clever text, later they cause you to question why they are amusing, and finally her pieces indicate that the humorousness comes from something deeper in our society.
Kruger’s You Are Not Yourself (1982) uses this humorous technique to underscore a feminist point of view. The words ‘you are not yourself’ are disjointedly laid over a photograph of a distressed woman looking into a shattered mirror. This montage is immediately ironic because you are looking into a mirror, the object our culture relies on to reflect reality, but it is cracked and without its reassurance you are not yourself. Somehow without the recognition of the mirror, the axis of our culture, your own existence is in question. This begs the question why are you not yourself? Continuing with the theme of feminist art, Kruger is perhaps indicating that you are not yourself because our culture, ruled by the mirror and the media, mandates that you be one thing that you are not or possibly may never be. Kruger is commenting on the unreality of the ideal female image portrayed by the media

Text from: http://dvisible.com/2007/04/05/you-are-not-yourself-a-glimpse-into-the-work-of-barbara-kruger/

Patricia Piccinini (Australian) – science and ethics in treatment and experimenting with animals

http://www.patriciapiccinini.net/

Hannah Hoch (German) - Gender, Politics

Beautiful Girl - 1920

"The Beautiful Girl" clad in a modern bathing suite, with a light bulb for her head, seated on a steel girder, surrounded by various images of industrialization. For example, BMW insignias, tires, gears and cogs and watches. In the right hand corner a black boxer appears stepping through the tire representing automation. In the back ground a silhouette of a woman's head with cats eyes stares at the audience.

Being modern meant speed, consumerism, urbanization and technology, these changes promoted hope for the women. Yet amongst the hope came fear as seen in the watchful cat eyed woman who lurks behind the scenes staring out at the audience. In this juxtapositinoing of images Hoch reflects upon a certain optimism for technology and its relationship to the modern woman. 


Text from - http://www.yellowbellywebdesign.com/hoch/madchen.html

For more info on Hannah Hoch:

Indeed, one of Höch's primary preoccupations was the representation of the "new woman" of the Weimar Republic, whose social role and personal identity were in a complex process of redefinition in the postwar period. Women enjoyed new freedoms, including the right to vote in 1918 and an increased presence in the working world, albeit in low-paid positions. The subsequent increase in disposable income made women a prime audience for the mass press, which became a venue for the expression of desires and anxieties associated with women's rapidly transforming identities. Juxtaposing photographs and text to both endorse and critique existing mass-media representations, Höch parodied elements of bourgeois living and morals and also probed the new, unstable definitions of femininity that were so widespread in postwar media culture.

Text from: http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2006/dada/artists/hoch.shtm

Jenny Saville (British) - Gender, Body Image

“Saville’s work interrogates our perceptions of the female body in challenging ways. To use the self in this way is to come full circle in the questioning of fixed identity and the body” (Meskimmon 125). She challenges the male fantasy of the perfect body and opens doors to alternative notions of beauty. 

Saville fights society’s ideal of the perfect body by showing her own enlarged and distorted body, which becomes the opposite of the skin and bones we see on the covers of magazines. In many paintings, she uses her own head and face and the body of an obese woman. "Jenny Saville has visualised her concern about the tyranny wielded over women by the fantasy of the perfect body in a series of larger-than-life-size nudes overlain with contour lines, words, and the kind of marks made by plastic surgeons in preparation for their cuts. Her innovation was to use her own distorted and enlarged nude body" (Rideal 31). She also defies the “male gaze” as she faces the viewer and one cannot ignore that she is actively making a bold statement about the female body. The fact that most of her paintings and photographs depict the body covering the entirety of the canvas, and sometimes spilling over the edges, adds to the drama of viewing the human body’s flesh and imperfections. “Saville’s self-portrait nudes overwhelm in their excess” (Meskimmon 123-124). From this perspective, we see the details of these imperfections, and in some paintings we see the body with markings similar to that of a plastic surgeon and provocative words etched into the skin. These in-your-face enlarged and distorted views of the human body force the viewer to reflect on their own self-image and distorted views and emotions about their own body. “They draw out something that is repressed or obscure in the viewer’s experience and bring it to light” (Gray 8). She creates emotion by filling the field of view with raw flesh. 


"Branded" (above) is one example of Saville using her own face on top of her enlarged body. Here, the obese body is raw and shows every imperfection. The body is inscribed with words such as "delicate," 'supportive,' 'irrational,' 'decorative,' and 'petite.' I think that these words could be a kind of internal dialogue in Saville's mind or words that one thinks about when viewing a body in all its naturality. She grasps the folds of her skin as a kind of gesture that would be individually interpreted by the viewer. The body faces the viewer with purpose and stature and does not conform to the notion of a passive object to be viewed, but is instead very in-your-face. "Saville's work interrogates our perception of the female body in challenging ways. To use the self in this way is to come full circle in the questioning of fixed identity and the body" (Meskimmon 125).


Text from: http://art1eproject.wetpaint.com/page/Jenny+Saville