TWO IMAGES OF ONE PANORAMA

This year’s programme of the second International Festival called The City of Women actually reminds me of some kind of hologram postcard which I found God-knows-where a few years ago. I remember that it had the face of a nice little girl with long blond plaits on it. But when I held it to the sun and looked at it from a different angle, there was another image: the little girl was stretching her demure face into a big smile and impishly sticking her tongue out at me. At that time we were still children and we were charmed by this dual image on a single postcard. We kept turning it towards the light and staring at the girls raspberry-like tongue. I thought of that girl when I started thinking about what, if anything, needed to be added to the introduction to this year’s The City of Women. The panorama of the festival also has two sides which reveal themselves depending on one’s attention and ways of looking, how much and what we are to see, and, of course, on the eyes that look.

There will be plenty of work for the eyes, ears and mind in the eight days of the festival, which is how long the city doors stay open. If last year’s festival was devoted to female creators from Western Europe and the United States, this year the situation is quite different. The City of Women showcases eminent interpreters of ‘sevdalinka’, the traditional Bosnian love song, Beba Selimović, Emina Zečaj and Vesna Hadžić; the voice of Mari Boine, which penetrates into the ancient worlds of the Sami culture and pre-Christian shamanism; a Greek vocalist and interpreter of the rembetika; Xanthi Mavri, accompanied by buzuki and accordion; one of the leading Macedonian folk singers, Petranka Kostadinova with the ‘Makedonski merak’ ensemble. As art by women is not unusual, we ask ourselves this year about ways of storytelling, as chosen by female artists in the ‘90s, no matter what their main artistic interests may be. We will find three completely different stories in the theatre. There is Guandaline Sagliocco with her new, fresh, comic interpretation of the myth of Jason and Medea. Then we have Sinja Ožbolt, with her most recent choreography called ‘Čudovite ruševine’ (‘Wonderful Ruins’), and there’s the Spanish performer, La Ribot. There will also be artists such as Jenny Holzer and Julia Scher (who can be reached through the Internet) and Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven at the Anonimus Gallery. There will also be video programmes at the City of Women’s VideoLibrary; a premiere of a video documentary by Zemira Alajbegović and Neven Korda called ‘Old for New’, which is about the Slovene alternative scene in the ‘80s; Marleen Gorris with a fascinating family chronicle, ‘Antonia’s Line’’, for which she received an Oscar for best foreign film this year. Every afternoon, discussions will be organised which try to lead us through the panorama of the City of Women, which becomes visible only if you look closely.

The second part of this year’s programme and the festival as a whole contains powerful and challenging art work produced by female artists, which was foreseen at the beginning of this century. Poets foresaw a time when the eternal slavery of women would be broken, when a woman would live of and for herself, when she would become a ‘poet’, a creator, one who would discover unknown, unusual, incomprehensible and repellent, precious things. So the City of Women presents the art and creativity of women who fought for and achieved the right to create and present their creations only in the last century, a situation which still differs from place to place.

Every year The City of Women offers a warning that the world does not provide equal opportunities for living and creating, and that such equality exists only in fairytales, as created in the lucid film by Marleen Gorris. A story of women, it is still a story with two faces, a postcard with two sides, and society ensures that we do not turn it towards the light and see its other, real side.

Uršula Cetinski

City of Women presents in Galerija Anonimus three rooms arranged by three contemporary artists. In “Eclips” Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven invites us in her androgynous “interior with video”. The virtual rooms of Julia Scher and Jenny Holzer are public spaces located (assuming one can still use this terminology) in the research and development laboratory äda’web. Surveillance artist Julia Scher offers us a “safe-haven” in her “Securityland”. Jenny Holzer’s “Please Change Beliefs” exposes the instability of beliefs on the constantly mutating info-bahn.

Annie-Mie Van Kerckhoven
Annie-Mie Van Kerckhoven (b. 1951, Antwerp) lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium.
From 1975 she started exhibiting her drawings, paintings, and later (multi-media) installations. In 1981, with Danny Devos, she founded the Club Moral, an artists’ initiative intended to present “extreme art in the field of performance, installation, and music”. Currently she teaches at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent and is a permanent guest-lecturer at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Her work has been shown extensively all over Europe, in the USA, Australia, and in Hong Kong.
“AMVK’s interest lies in the alchemy of reality: not what it is, but what forces underly it (...) AMVK breaks open and binds. She shows the fetishism of our consciousness. The alliances AMVK describes never find once-and-for-all expression: the real reality is protean, ever-changing, shape-shifting. (...) (her) work displays a demiurgic will to total awareness; in her protest it takes on the repressive traits of the structures it aims to break down. (...) In contrast to the organisation of the world, her work attempts an anti-brainwash. A blunt choice, certainly in an art context in which an indirect approach is often taken, in which irony speaks from the corner of its mouth (...) She chooses protest - outside the context of protest. (...) With the face of the pantocrator, she steers our consciousness off the rails, outside itself.” (Dirk Pültau)