Review of Francesca Woodman: On Being An Angel at Foam, Amsterdam

07/01/16

Francesca Woodman: On Being An Angel

Foam, Amsterdam

18 December 2015 – 9 March 2016

The sad thing about Francesca Woodman’s work is that it cannot be reviewed without hindsight and reference to the photographer’s premature death at the age of 22, when she jumped from a building in East Side, New York. As with her contemporary, Ana Mendieta (1948-85), who died falling from a 34th floor apartment in Greenwich Village, critics and academics have sought to see her work as a premonition of what was to come, with the female subject – commonly Woodman herself – melting into the background, becoming indistinguishable from the wallpaper or crumbling stone of the derelict building, “anticipating her own disappearance”.¹ Woodman’s photographs, like Mendieta’s, often depict a silhouette or trace, a blurred impression, a delicate and ghostly absence of the subject, suggesting a sense of has-been or might-have-been. Did the teenage girl foresee her untimely end?

Read the full review here

Review of Eva Stenram: Positions at the Siobhan Davies School of Dance

22/02/15

Eva Stenram: Positions

Siobhan Davies School of Dance

16 January – 22 March 2015

Just as languages are made up of signs, carefully arranged according to rules of syntax, so dances are made up of positions, choreographed to present a certain imagery. In her various series of photographic works, currently on show at the Siobhan Davies School of Dance in Southwark, Eva Stenram collates these different postures – actually digitally isolated from 1950s and 60s pin-ups, not dance-related at all – into a dictionary of gesture and posture, full of possibility of meaning.

All around the building – in reception, in the meeting room, in the stairwell, in the toilet – she has hung works from her on-going series, Parts (2013-14). Stockinged limbs, some with fishnets, most with stilettos, on leather sofas and carpets with thick pile, the feet arch as a moment of intimacy or rapture is interrupted. Carelessly discarded, these legs appear sinister – the images could perhaps be crime scene shots. This uncanny element resonates still more with the chosen real world surroundings when, upstairs, outside the practice rooms, a row of empty shoes stand in line, beneath a photograph of a castaway limb.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2015/02/positions-2/

Review of Salon Hystérique: La Petit Mort et La Grande Hystérie at Blacks

25/02/14

Salon Hystérique: La Petit Mort et La Grande Hystérie

A group art exhibition of hysteric feminisms

Curated by Gabriella Daris

Blacks Members Club, 67 Dean Street

21 January – 19 April 2014

In what seems to be a season of feminist art shows in private members’ clubs around London (this comes hot on the heels of 2Q13: Women Artists, Women Collectors, curated by Marcelle Joseph and Lydia Cowpertwait, at Lloyd’s Club last autumn), curator Gabriella Daris has brought together, in the sumptuous Georgian townhouse surroundings of Blacks on Dean Street, some high quality and enjoyable works exploring what it means to be a woman, to have a vagina and a womb, and to use these bodily parts both for the furthering of life as well as for personal pleasure. Of course, as the title suggests, the exhibition also explores the association of the womb with hysteria, from its origins, at the time of continental mind doctors such as Charcot and Freud, to its current day incarnation, perhaps more commonly associated with feminist emancipation and desire.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.divamag.co.uk/category/arts-entertainment/review-salon-hysterique.aspx

Book Review of Hysteria: A Collection of Feminisms (Square Knot Publishing)

Published in F22 Issue 13 February/March 2014

Review of Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors at the Freud Museum

09/12/13

Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors

Freud Museum

10 October 2013 – 2 February 2014

In late-19th-century Paris, after decades of political upheaval and social unrest, and an era of neurasthenia, fainting spells, and “the vapours”, a new psychological illness took to the stage: hysteria (from the Greek hystero, meaning womb) was pronounced “the illness of the age” by the prominent journalist, novelist, and playwright Jules Claretie. Largely considered a female malady, it turned women into the focus for the expression of many millennial fears and anxieties. From the 1870s onwards, stories about hysterical patients filled the newspaper columns. They were transformed into fictional characters by novelists, photographed, sculpted, painted, and drawn to such an extent that Georges Didi-Huberman feels “nearly compelled to consider hysteria, insofar as it was fabricated at the Salpêtrière [hospital] in the last third of the 19th century, as a chapter in the history of art.”

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/mad-bad-and-sad-women-and-the-mind-doctors