Mumok: Art checking gender

The new ‘Gender Check’ exhibition spread out over three levels in Vienna’s Museum of Modern Art (Mumok) is showing 400 works by 200 artists from 24 Eastern European countries. It sounds, and is, a lot. Despite its scale, however, curator Bojana Pejić has succeeded in putting together a thoroughly coherent exhibition, which examines the change in clichés regarding male and female roles in the Eastern European region over the last 50 years.

From the tractor to the kitchen

Lots of artists in Eastern Europe created very ‘gender-aware’ works, as curator Bojana Pejić points out at the opening of the exhibition. However, until today, there has never been a satisfactory exchange of ideas about this area of art. The past has still not been analysed in enough depth, a state of affairs which this exhibition aims to change. “The ‘Gender Check’ exhibition is designed to show what we all have in common,” says Pejić in an interview with Mumok Insights, the museum’s in-house magazine.

The very first section of ‘Gender Check’ is devoted to the all-embracing topic of work in the former Communist states. For years, many of the ‘official’ paintings portrayed an idealised view of a gender-neutral world of work. The exhibition contrasts the frequently shown picture of a woman on the tractor with a second, critical view – a woman in the kitchen. It was indeed the case that women, besides carrying out their public work, were more involved than men with domestic work and there was as little equality in Eastern Europe as there was in the West.




Another subject that was equally ignored was that of domestic violence. Pejić was only able to root out two pictures dealing with the subject, although from the 1970s onwards, the investigation of private life and sex became a big topic. Around that time, many female artists began to reinvent the self-portrait for their own ends. The idea was not so much to change the cliché of the male creative genius and show a female creative genius instead, but much rather to use self-portraits as a means of critical self-observation and to examine the female body.  New media, like film, video and performance art, were increasingly used for this purpose.

Racism and sexism on the rise

Many of the paintings of those times began to question the representation of male heroism, expressing criticism of ideas like militarism. The subject of homosexuality, on the other hand, was barely addressed – a subject that has its tragic side today amidst the burgeoning nationalism in many countries since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Igor Grubiċ’s video work is horrific in this respect, showing attacks on homosexuals in Croatia, while the police look on and do nothing.

Besides nationalism and the renewed increase in homophobia after 1989, ‘Gender Check’ also presents the new picture of femininity that started to appear after the fall of Communism – the archetypal prostitute. Democratisation didn’t just result in much longed-for freedom, but also brought with it human trafficking, sex work and pornography. And so the 50 years covered by the exhibition provide yet another example of the fact that what is often praised as progress can also represent a step backwards in other ways and comes at a cost for weaker and less fortunate people.

Many of these overlapping stories are linked by a common theme, as museum director Edelbert Köb points out. You can’t help agreeing with him – and you can see that this common theme is not all that far removed from our own society.