Feminist Parties

Feminist Parties

The Feminist Parties is a series of events initiated by Alba D’Urbano and Tina Bara in connection with the action day #wessenfreiheit. They invite feminist figures of art and culture to present their work and experiences through lectures, work presentations and workshops.

For decades the vast majority of professors and lecturers at the HGB have been white and male, consequently leaving students – many women – with few female role models and hardly any female colleagues with whom they can work. This gap is reflected in the curriculum, where courses on feminism are rarely offered, with the result that important feminist artistic positions are unfamiliar to students.

Those invites are both feminists from the start and those who have subsequently been actively engaged with the concept of feminism and its content in art and society. The event series is interdisciplinary. Faculty and students are encouraged to suggest and invite guests.

Annegret Soltau 2019

The Sewed Woman- how I found art and it became my destiny

Lecture 26.06.2019, at 18.00, room 2.41

 
 
 
 

Annegret Soltau is best known for her collages and photo fiber works. As a metaphor for Soltau’s artistic work, the sewn woman stands between approval and rejection, but also indicates very concretely her working method and refers to contents that take up social conditions in different directions.
 
 
 
 
 

Annegret Soltau is a member of the Darmstadt Secession, the Photographic Academy in Leinfelden, the German Artists‘ Association, and has taught at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Offenbach am Main, the Fachhochschule Bielefeld, the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, the Hochschule Darmstadt and the International Summer Academy in Salzburg.
 
1998 Maria Sibylla Merian Prize, Wiesbaden
2000 Wilhelm Loth Prize, Art Prize of the City of Darmstadt
2011 Marielies Hess Art Prize, Frankfurt am Main
2016 Johann-Heinrich-Merck-Award of the city of Darmstadt

Gluklya 2019

Gluklya’s performance and visual practice revolves around the manifesto, “The place of the artist is on the side of the weak.” She uses clothing, installations, performance, video, text and research to develop the concept of ‘fragility’ – a subject that is interpreted not in the sense of ‚beauty,‘ but in that of ‘invisible strength.’ In her projects, she addresses the personal stories of her characters, analyzing them and revealing conflict between political systems and personal inner worlds. Her work explores topics of social exclusion, underestimation of intuitive knowledge, mind-body connections, violation of human rights and stereotypes of human behavior. Active since the mid-1990s in Russia — Gluklya co-founded the Factory of Found Clothes in St. Petersburg and was a founding member of Chto Delat (What is to be done?) – the artist now principally lives and works in Amsterdam.

I derive my works from the notion of fragility — a strategy based on the practicing of art as a healing and emancipatory method, often embracing childhood traumas and ambivalent dilemmas. Dialogue for me is always important topic, helping to construct the situation for the work.

Gluklya’s (Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya) practice contests power structures in public urban space, create Utopian Costumes together with refugees, engages to the talks about justice and its complexity people from very different confessions, drawings spirits of the crazy thinkers, organising protest demonstrations and meditate on the Clothes that overcome it is function and some other things .. She is the co-founder of Factory of Found Clothes and Chto Delat groups. Gluklya uses installations, performance, video, text and research to develop her concept of ‘fragility’–a subject that should be interpreted not in the sense of ‚beauty,‘ but in that of ‘invisible strength.’ In her projects, she addresses the personal stories of her characters, analysing them and revealing the conflict between political systems and a person’s inner world. Her work process is playful and her studio often turns into a meeting place where people work together on conceptualizing clothes and making other useable artistic items. Gluklya’s oeuvre speaks of indignation and hope. She makes us attentive of injustice and she proposes playful ways through which people can resist injustice. Her work points to hidden tactics that people might invent, with the help of the artist, to empower themselves and navigate through structures of repression. During the 56th Venice Biennale, Gluklya presented forty-three ‘Clothes for Demonstration Against False Election of Vladimir Putin (2011-2015)’ in the exhibition ‘All the World’s Futures.’ At 2019 her major research on the condition of refugees staying in the formal prison Bijlmer Bajes in Amsterdam was accomplished by street protest performance and Installation in Vam abbe museum , NL, during Positions -4

The Place of the artist is on the Side of the Weak

The idea was to create a collective, performative work with clothes. The final format was open and depending from the ideas and interaction of the students during the workshop.
The artist invited the students to bring some item of the garment from their wardrobe, which were significant for them. They could choose the clothes for different reasons: Encounter with somebody, memory of the persons, or moment of their life like the childhood, or something else: Clothes as a witness for Love or Hate story.
During the workshop each of the participants recounted the story around its item. After that they made drawings with reflected their ides, concepts, thought. The stories were collected and last day they were recited together. A sculptural installation was made in the class, which remained for some weeks. A short video documents the workshop in a poetical way.

Participants:
Bernhard Bormann, Laura Derr, Stephanie Joyce, Elisaveta Kuznetsova, Tatjana Lentini, Carolin Otto, Katharina Schreiter, Sophie Wolf u.a.