As a creator I personally indentify myself as an artist instead of a “female” artist or an “feminist” artist , however, why should we still haveto tag people’s occupations with kinds of gender descriptions? Is that necessary to do so? Unfortunately, The reality is that women still have a long way to achieve their goal of getting our equal rights and respects. We have different aims to achieve from the groups all around the world, it tates longer than usual.
Akerman and Messager is the artist fighters who tried to visualize women’s needs. In the exhibition, Akerman’s double screen video “Women from Antwrep in November,2008” showed a slide of a woman smoking – The face of a woman is in close-up smoking a cigarette; a sequence of twenty sketches form an emotional and psychological landscape, a declination of the possible situational context of this action. These video projections presented the action itself silently, keep certain space for the imagination, focus on these emotional smoking moments self, which were not only the daily action, which is also a metaphor of holding similar kinds of men’s power (Sexual in Nature and referecing to this leards research to Edward Bernays ). Posting the thorny question of women’s ultimate freedom over their bodies, the work is an evocative meditation on borders and boundaries, fiction and narrative, and the intersection of personal history and collective memory. The piece exemplifies Akerman’s pioneering work in merging the worlds of cinema and the visual arts through video installation.
Different from Akerman’s Visual works, Messager’s installation art pieces delivered the messages obviously. From the earlier work “Les Approches” , series of the puppet sculptures to the Recent embroidery proverbs she present strong feminine words in two extreme ways- either gothic , black humor way or a kind of colorful and playful way. And her newest work “Memoire-Robots” mixed these 2 styles both –Black veil covering the first term suggest intimate , remembered moments , deeply interwoven in the nets of our lives. The second term making the idea of machine without a past, with the power to replace humans , seem deceptively innocuous.
Art is one of the way to express our appeals, to express that which is deep within our private self , yet most of time we have to accept that a small progress may take a life time to achieve. Stay the strong, warm and positive woman should be with much patience, although each of us probably will be a tiny building block of this road.
Annette Messager – La Petite Ballerine 2011
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