International group exhibition

22. June – 28. July 2023

Exhibiting Artist: Anna Fabricius, Silvia Prio, Noémi Szécsi, Maria Contreras Coll, Iza Štrumbelj Oblak, Olga Stefatou

The exhibition deals with issues of gender, status and roles played by the female protagonists of this exhibition project in certain existential situations. We have selected artists’ projects that represent different women’s strategies, which establish emotional, sexual, economic or social possibilities for their individual empowerment in environments that are unfavourable to their unconventional choices. At the beginning, we asked ourselves the question of how gender roles are defined, or how social situations and processes in different parts of the world shape them. It is relevant to our project how the individual fates of women in these processes are seen and reflected by female artists working in the media of photography and moving images. Especially since, with the choice of motifs and stories, they partly speak about their own destinies and their personal preoccupations.
The project sheds light on selected stories of women’s communities and stories of individuals that are often overlooked in today’s world. It also thematises areas where gender is no longer important or the female protagonists have shaken off signs of gender determination, which is no longer relevant to them. The exhibition does not only focus on the female body, which is in the age of capitalism increasingly reduced to an object (of desire), but also on the energy, strength and independence possessed by the female protagonists. In fact, the theme of this exhibition is transformation. The transformation of a woman from an a priori socially determined role into something that gives her meaning and power in life. The stories of all the protagonists in the exhibition are similar in this respect. Once they were just “a something”, but now they are beings full of inner strength and yes, even beauty. From ordinary “grey birds” they have turned into beautiful wild swans, which no one and nothing can tame.
The Wild Swans exhibition project takes us through various aspects of the transformations that the stories’ protagonists had to face. Transformations can be painful and traumatic, as well as completely natural or even necessary. We thought it important to present works in which female artists highlight the strength, experience and knowledge that women acquire in the process of transformation. This power, for which we have fought for so long, but which remains so fragile, represents the driving force of female emancipation. With this project, we also want to show that the experiences of women’s emancipation or their empowerment are very diverse and paradoxical. Sometimes they even look like something that confirms the conservative or patriarchal order. The paradox of female emancipation is most present today, when the ideal of a perfect, artificially maintained, and above all young, body is at the forefront of women’s longing. The dictatorship of a healthy body designed according to modern canons and the ubiquity of social networks, which operate on narcissism, put different values in the foreground. It is for this reason that we want to shed light on the values that are important to preserve and that represent the essence of female nature.

Curator: Dejan Sluga and Metka Zupanič

Exhibition catalog

Photos from the exhibition opening

Exhibition Wild Swans in Dnevnik” (Slovenian)

Exhibition Wild Swans in the show Culture on RTV SLO (Slovenian)

Article on the Wild Swans exhibition on the portal Koridor – križišča umetnosti (Slovene)

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