The exhibition “She – Wolves_Erotism > Love > Body”, curated by Laura Leuzzi at Re_Exhibit_ Rewind Online Gallery, is as fluctuating as the video art it exhibits and presents, and is open to the public 31 August 2024. Perhaps ‘open’ is not the best word to use, given that the exhibition is totally digital, accessible through a link that transcends the concept of openness and closure. However, the root of its meaning can be found in the path of the Internet user, an immaterial adventurer in his own online double, wandering in the void filled with anything and everything.
The works exhibited are incredibly at ease in this immaterial space, as they too are immaterial, even though their immateriality is very different and far removed from that which we are accustomed to today. This is an analogue immateriality, digitally translated, which presupposes a support, which can be seen in the ripples of the translated from its negative, thus connecting its ontology to a reality which is much more vivid than the aseptic digital space in which we are immersed, and slightly more than the last work on display, the fifth, which after a battery of sensual, historicised works reconnects us with the contemporary, with a technical and conceptual expression that is so different and yet so akin to the video experiments of the 1970s and 1980s that we have previously experienced.
Laura Leuzzi structures a route made up of stages, a sort of corridor where we walk through the micro-movement of scrolling, consisting of doors that are meditative openings into women’s video experimentation. The meaning of this route is made clear by the very title of the exhibition. Inspired by Clarissa Pinkola Estès’ famous book Woman who runs with the wolves (1992) and the figure of the she-wolf, the exhibition shows us a free female body, pure sexuality, and an exploration of eroticism, love and the body itself. An eroticism, therefore, doubly linked to the macro-concept of Nature – a purely feminine limpid sexuality, free of any superstructure.
In this cerebral, pseudo-physical exploration, we come across Antoine Frank Grahamsdaughter‘s first video work, Transit (1986) with its saturated, acid colours and the vision of a bare-breasted woman, which alternates between a boa and a wolf. The woman establishes visual links with the two animals: she becomes a snake, harking back to the biblical lost paradise, and then a she-wolf, a wild woman and dominatrix of the city environment – Brussels echoing among the plagues of images.
We then move on to Lydia Schouten’s lively and playful first work The Lone Ranger Lost in the Jungle of Erotic Desire (1981), which depicts the artist’s joyful freedom as she experiences the environment – a colourful and artificial cardboard jungle – by rolling naked over sand paintings in a kind of tribal dance, destroying them and transforming them into her own experience. The depicted image becomes the result of the artist’s actions.
The video work by the painter Živa Kraus, The Motovun Tape (1976), is much more reflective and less light-hearted than the previous work, and poetically shows us how the artist’s body, more specifically the hand, becomes an instrument for exploring the world around it. Its sensual caressing of Motovun’s city walls opens up an inner, personal exploration that is also steeped in historical memory.
Irony and playfulness make a powerful return in Maria Vedder and Bettina Gruber’s video work, Mama’s Little Pleasure (1984). In this work, accompanied by music written by Gruber, Vadder explores the themes of eroticism and sexuality by first playing a sailor and then a dancer in a small arranged set. Her gestures, poses and glances, together with the props and the lyrics of the songs we listen to, even the dog included in the work, all contribute to a true thesis that rejects the stereotype and undoes the religious preconception linking sex with love.
Finally, the exhibition ends with the 2023 video by Elisabetta Di Sopra, which makes a connection with contemporary artistic reflections, to point out that what we are experiencing is not archaeology. It was not born and neither did it end in the past, but exploded with an incredible energy half a century ago to become an indispensable witness of present reflections, the starting point of a fundamental and unresolved reasoning. In this video, the artist, a shamanic figure, walks barefoot in the Wadi Rum desert in Jordan to explore the dunes, experiencing the world through her body and entering into dialogue with the sand through her footprints, which she eventually erases with a cloth and, at the same time, disappears in the smear of that erasure which has eliminated her presence (the footprints) but not her living experience (the smear is not total absence).
“Inspired by the famous book by Clarissa Pinkola Estès, Women who run with the wolves, this small, curated selection engages with the notion of a woman that unleashes the power of an ancient female archetype: “A healthy woman is much like a wolf: robust, chock-full, strong life force, life-giving, territorially aware, inventive, loyal, roving.”
This creature – as portrayed by Pinkola Estès – is fired up by a heat that is not limited to sexual arousal but is expanded to an “intense sensory awareness” which includes her sexuality. All her senses – taste, touch, sound, sight and much more – are activated by stimuli.”
This is what we read in the introduction to the exhibition written by Leuzzi, catapulting us into illuminating feminist demands, an example of an exhibition that appears to us as pure and to the point, a bearer of meaning in a reality that is, perhaps, too often confused.
Re-Exhibit She – Wolves_Erotism > Love > Body, online exhibition at Re_Exhibit_ Rewind, curated by Laura Leuzzi ( art historian and curator, currently Chancellor’s Fellow at RGU, Aberdeen), until Agust 31 2024
Artists: Elisabetta Di Sopra, Antonie Frank Grahamsdaughter, Bettina Gruber, Živa Kraus, Lydia Schouten and Maria Vedder
This exhibition develops from materials and interviews collected during previous AHRC projects including EWVA European Women’s Video Art (2015-18) and REWINDItalia (2011-14); and is inspired by Leuzzi’s work with Diana Georgiou and Giulia Casalini, as well as a recent chapter for the upcoming book Wives, Witches, and Whores, edited by Helen Gorrill, published by Bloomsbury.
images:(cover 1) Antonie Frank Grahamsdaughter ,«Transit», 1986, still from video (2) Lydia Schouten, «The Lone Ranger Lost in the Jungle of Erotic Desire», 1981 , still from video (3) Živa Kraus, «Motovun Tape», 1976, still from video (4) Maria Vedder e Bettina Gruber, «Mamas Little Pleasure», 1984, still from video (5) Elisabetta di Sopra, «Senza Tracce», 2023, still from video
