Interview with Tamsyn Challenger

22/08/18

Interview with Tamsyn Challenger 

Tamsyn Challenger is an artist whose practice responds to violations of human and women’s rights around the world. Her collective gender-political portrait, 400 Women (2010), was made following a visit to Mexico in 2006, where she met with the mothers and families of women who had been brutally raped and murdered or who had disappeared, in the town of Ciudad Juarez. Her current curatorial venture, Free the Pussy!, at Edinburgh’s Summerhall, comprises works made in response to – and representing the core issues relating to – the arrest in 2012 of Pussy Riot, following their pop-up protest performance, Punk Prayer, at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which attacked the Orthodox church’s support for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Featuring works by the likes of Judy Chicago, Yoko Ono and Carolee Schneemann, the exhibition also includes Challenger’s own work, Ducking Stool (2012).

Studio International spoke to Challenger about the origins of the exhibition, the roles of the artist-curator and the female artist in contemporary society, and the need for women to reclaim and own powerful words, such as “pussy” and “cunt”.

Read the full interview here

Interview with Judy Chicago (auf Deutsch)

20/10/15

Interview: Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago, zurzeit ist von einer neuen Feminismus-Welle die Rede, zu der etwa die britische Autorin Laurie Penny oder die US-amerikanische Autorin und Schauspielerin Lena Durham gezählt werden. Was halten Sie von den zeitgenössischen Feministinnen?

Es gibt viele von ihnen, und das ist gut. Ich habe heute in der Zeitung von einer Frau gelesen, die als „Feminazi“ bezeichnet wird, weil sie einen Kerl beschimpft hat, als er Bemerkungen über ihr Aussehen bei LinkedIn machte. Der Artikel berichtet darüber, wie der Begriff verwendet wird, um Frauen zum Schweigen zu bringen, und wie es wieder ein Interesse am Feminismus unter jungen Frauen gibt. So ist es in der Regel: ein Schritt vorwärts, ein Schritt zurück, ein Schritt vorwärts…

Read the full interview in the November issue of Monopol magazine

Interview with Judy Chicago

12/09/15
Interview: Judy Chicago

Star Cunts & Other Attractions
Riflemaker
14 September - 31 December 2015

The World Goes Pop
Tate Modern
17 September 2015 - 24 January 2016

In 1968, Judy Chicago (born Judith Sylvia Cohen, 1939) chose not to participate in the California Women in the Arts exhibition at the Lytton Center because she didn’t want to show in any group defined as “women”, “Jewish” or “California”. A couple of years later, however, she coined the term “feminist art” and she then went on to become known worldwide for her epic $250,000 installation, The Dinner Party (1979) – a large triangular table, measuring 48ft by 43ft by 36ft (14.6 metres by 13 metres by 11 metres), with 39 place settings, each commemorating a historical or mythical female figure. Throughout her career, Chicago has been an outspoken advocate for female artists and has written, taught and co-founded educational establishments in a bid to put an end to what she terms the “institutional failure in our universities and museums to teach the history of feminist art”.

In 2011, the Pacific Standard Time project at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, brought attention to a lot of Chicago’s early work and reminded people that there is more to her than her iconic place settings. The following year, she had a show at Riflemaker in London, and the year after that, she was included in the Spotlight section – a section for artists whom the curator deems to have been overlooked and deserving of re-evaluation – of Frieze Masters, also in London.

Read the rest of this interview here