Installation shot Feminist Futures Forever, L-R, Ines Doujak, Hera, 2008 , Ashley Hans Scheirl, Relatively Ordered Scenery, 2003; Landschaftsvorfall mit Darm, 2003, Katrina Daschner, Frau Professor La Rose, 2012, Cindy Sherman, Untitled #113, 1982, Maria Lassnig, Die Angepflockte, 1981, Sarah Lucas, Portable Smoking Area, 1996, Stephanie Misa, The Séance, 2021. Photo by Johannes Stoll courtesy of the Belveder21
THE EXHIBIT:
Feminist Futures Forever
5 November 2026 -8 March 2027
Belvedere 21, Vienna
The exhibition Feminist Futures Forever brings together 238 international artists from different generations to present a polyphonic, intersectional panorama of feminist art from the historical feminist avant-garde through to possible futures.
It ties together feminist demands, sociopolitical impacts, and different temporalities: each desire for change critically engages with its own past and present while looking towards the conditions of an imagined future. Feminist Futures Forever adheres to this principle and, by looking back at the 1985 exhibition Kunst mit Eigen-Sinn (Art with a Mind of Its Own), brings international, intersectional, and intergenerational positions into dialogue with one another. The individual works of art are key: their narratives interact in spaces inspired by everyday life, enabling visitors to intuitively experience possible models for the future.
On view are works by Marina Abramović, Kurdwin Ayub, Kaucyila Brooke, Sophie Calle, VALIE EXPORT, Isa Genzken, Jenny Holzer, Soli Kiani, Brigitte Kowanz, Barbara Kruger, Maria Lassnig, Sarah Lucas, Yoko Ono, Cindy Sherman, Nancy Spero among many others.
The Séance, 2021
acrylic & brass chandeliers, cast iron pulleys, 10mm polypropylene braided rope, black paraffin wax candles, faux fur carpets
The Séance is part of a larger installation first exhibited at the Gallery Gundula Gruber in March 2021, as a direct response to the Capitol Riots in Washington D.C. in January of the same year.
As Brian Haman writes in his review for Art Asia Pacific, “The other imposing visual presence in the space was The Séance, a suspended acrylic-and-brass chandelier with black paraffin chicken feet in various states of deliquescence. The piece’s multilayered symbolism serves variously as a portal in which two revolutionary historical moments merge; an ironic reference to the rooster in the logo of the far-right organization Proud Boys; and a reassertion of the importance of the chicken foot as an amulet of protection in folk ritualistic spiritual crossings.
An important undercurrent throughout the show was a passage from Karl Marx’s 1852 essay “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in which he wrote that people “anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.” Misa’s blending of 19th-century Marxist thought and Filipino culture with a dose of irony underscored the grotesqueries that can pervade the ritualistic political gathering of people, first as tragedy in the case of France’s post-Revolutionary Terror, and then as farce under the guardianship of the “QAnon Shaman,” the Proud Boys, and their ilk.“
Images by Johannes Stoll Courtesy of the Belvedere 21 and Jolly Schwarz courtesy of Gallery Gundula Gruber