MIA Art Collection, the collection of art founded by Chilean philanthropist Alejandra Castro Rioseco, who has more than +900 works of art created by female artists, presents a virtual exhibition inside her MIA Anywhere Virtual Museum with artists who explore feminist demands through their work.
It is not a secret that the art world still is a very hard and hostile place for women. The sales and exhibition, even with a covid-19 context, still privilege the art made my male artists. Since the 1960’s feminism has been the source of exceptional theoretical and practical innovations in contemporary art, drawing attention not only to the role of sexuality in artistic creation, but to problems everyday woman has, until these days, with a new wave of contemporary artists who have railed the feminist cause and proposed new ways of looking at private and public spheres, the objects inside the museum and its subjects.
MIA curators have selected four contemporary artists who have been able to demonstrate, through their unique point of view, influences by their geographic location, culture, and work environment, how they perceive the role of a contemporary feminist woman: Shida Azari from Iran, Nermine Said from Egypt, Luisa Callegari from Brazil, and Andrea Rojas Arellano from Chile.
Nermine Said is a costume designer, photographer and researcher, so her work is based in the analysis of characters, symbolic powers of accessories and the use of the female body as a communication process. The use of color inside Shida Azari’s paintings take us on a personal level inside female intimacy, a journey of feelings and the representation of parts of a woman’s body as an ocean of deep thoughts and observations.
Luisa Callegari deals with the subjects such as the female body, violence, gender issues, sexuality and motherhood. She is interested in the search of a continuous body, “a space in between the object and the abject”, challenging the way society sees and treats the female body and the social roles attributed to women.
Andrea creates her work focusing on concepts like invisibility, residue, vestige and testimony, considering herself a storyteller of women’s journeys in human history. As a feminist artists, she puts her interests mainly to explore woman issues, taking especial emphasis in generating a social-political awareness, evidencing human memories as a result of the violence that women and girls tends to suffer in society.
These four artists are a reminder that, while many of the debates inaugurated in these decades of inequality are still ongoing, a young generation of new feminist artists from all over the world are taking new approaches, incorporating new topics such as race, class, gender identity, fluidity, and following the motivation of MIA Art Collection, both feminism and feminist art continue to evolve.
You can see this exhibition virtually inside our MIA Anywhere Virtual museum (www.miaanywhere.com) from 28th September until 7th October 2020. Follow MIA Art Collection social media accounts (www.instagram.com/miaartcollection) to have exclusive access to these artists artworks.