VENUS. FEMINIST REMAKES

Venus:

1. Visual depiction of the goddess Venus.
2. A prehistoric statuette of a female figure usually carved in stone, ivory or bone.
3. An exceptionally beautiful woman.
4. (obsolete) Physical desire, sexual appetite.

How many images of Venus can you recall? What would you do if you were one of them? How can the position of Venus be occupied from a feminist and critical perspective, breaking with the dichotomy between subject and object? Is it possible to enact this re-appropriation through a process of working with performance? Can this feminist re-appropriation be used to articulate other non-patriarchal, non-racist and non-heteronormative art histories? How can we re-appropriate the works of Manet, Gaugin, Velázquez, Picasso and Yves Klein, to name just a few of those classic and contemporary geniuses?

Taking Venus as a paradigmatic figure of the position assigned to women within the hegemonic narrative of art history, the workshop Venus. Feminist Remakes proposes, through a process of working with performance, to re-appropriate manifold artworks, both classic and contemporary, which have gone towards cementing the mythology of the artist as genius, and helped to structure the two opposing positions of subject and object. Viewing the remake as a political strategy of subversion and at once as a possibility of rewriting, we will undertake various feminist remakes in which we will occupy, displace and go beyond the multiple Venuses that populate the history of art.

Colektivof is a duo comprised of Eva Garrido and Yera Moreno, who have been working together since 2007 on various projects which address, from the optic of feminism, the relationship that bodies establish with time and space, positing new ways of experimenting with the everyday that subvert normative reality. These works are materialized in varying formats including performances, workshops, photographic archives, writing, videos and research projects: http://colektivof.com/

Aimed at artists, cultural producers, performers, educators, fine art and art history students 

Enrolment free until 30 May. Download the enrolment form, fill it in and return it to actividades.ca2m@madrid.org Participation in the workshop will be confirmed on 1 June

Project selected in the call organised by MAV for inclusion in the Women’s Views Biennial 2016, for its feminist content in consonance with good practices, social return and the recovery of feminine memory.