hunt kastner is pleased to present an exhibition that will showcase the work of two artists, whose practice over the years has made significant contributions to the discourse of contemporary art. The exhibition brings together the practice of two feminist artists, Ewa Partum and Lenka Klodová, who work in different aesthetics but share a similar focus on women’s emancipation from constraints, stereotypes and oppression. The exhibition focuses on time-specific feminist struggles in East Central Europe during the periods of socialism and neo-liberalism, and stages productive dialogue between the artistic practices of Partum and Klodová.

The artistic practices of both artists have emerged from different disciplines and artistic contexts: Ewa Partum’s work emerged from a critique of painting and conceptual art, and Lenka Klodova’s from the context of the expansion of sculpture and radical identity-based art characteristic of the period of political transformation. Both have arrived at employing their own bodies as artistic tools in performative works. With radically different aesthetics, the artists explore feminist issues of the constructed divisions between the private and public spheres, in relation to their own bodies, roles and stereotypes of women, as well as a supposedly universal and genderless language. They address topics such as the relationship between motherhood and artistic practice, and have used their art for the feminist conscience rising. In their biopolitical works, in which they have mastered administrative language, they show how the apparatus of the state determines the status of gendered bodies.

The exhibition positions Lenka Klodová’s work as a tool for rereading Ewa Partum’s feminist practice, but at the same time it presents Ewa Partum’s work as an active context for Klodová’s practice, recreating intergenerational artistic ties and genealogies of post-socialist feminist art. The aim of the exhibition is not only to show formal correspondences, motifs and themes between the artists, but also to demonstrate how differently they used their tools, such as the naked body and language, in different socio-political contexts. How differently they developed strategies, such as provocation and social mobilisation in public space, before and after the political changes of 1989. Thus, the exhibition traces the emergence of different strands of feminist art in East Central Europe.

Karolina Majewska-Güde