While the range of themes of “Female Lenses for Art Activism” reaches far and wide, the artists intersect in their multi-layered and multi-faceted artistic practice. The artists on show deal with pressing issues and offer a female lens with which to view these. Consciousness, ancestry, sustainability, mental health, technology, and energies are some of the topics the artists tackle. But while their topics hardly intersect, their savvy artistic skill does. All these women show their work in unique multi-disciplinary ways that combine and remix forms to create work that demands to be seen. The urgency of their work urges us to see these artists as activists, for they are both pushing forth their female lenses with pride while also tackling pressing issues we must acknowledge and observe in our contemporary society.
Female-identifying artists everywhere face countless challenges in and out of the art world. MIA Art Collection’s mission, as defined by its founder Alejandra Castro Rioseco, has been to increase the visibility of female artists everywhere. The defining characteristic of MIA is to exclusively collect and promote female artists on a global scale. For our team and for people everywhere, COVID-19 has drastically changed the professional and personal landscape. To adapt to this situation, we have launched a new initiative which has brought our collection online. In MIA Anywhere, we showcase works from both our permanent collection as well as by visiting artists. After only some weeks running, we have featured the work of female artists from Iran to Peru, Brazil to Spain.
El siglo XX fue una centuria convulsa y preñada de cambios, de grandes revoluciones sociales y económicas cuyo contrapeso fue la proliferación de dictaduras que intentaban poner freno a unas libertades lentamente conquistadas ligadas a la consecución de sociedades más justas, igualitarias, y con un mayor reparto de la riqueza. Uno de los movimientos sociales heredados del siglo XIX y que a lo largo de este período empezaba a ponerse en práctica era el feminismo. Desde la demanda de las mujeres a acceder a la educación primaria y secundaria -más adelante también la superior-, hasta cambios en una legislación que se basaba en una presunta superioridad de los varones y que concebía a las mujeres como permanentes menores de edad. Otra de las exigencias básicas del siglo fue la reivindicación del derecho al voto.
As time passes, memory becomes diluted. Art histories’ memory seems to have more thoroughly and more quickly diluted the names of its female contributors. Many of the women involved in the arts have, thus, become large unknowns not only to the wider audience but to scholars, artists and historians.
Starting from the feminist maxim that “Neither land nor womenare territory of conquest”, an exhibition with women artists who work on the global concern for the climate emergency and the unequal relationship between human and nature is proposed.
Their works address issues as diverse as the speed of a system that is depleting and depleting the planet; the observation of nature as a place to rest, reflect, return to our origin, or what the future would be like if the nature-human symbiosis were a biological reality.
Taking up the idea of Donna Haraway’s 1985 “A Cyborg Manifesto”, this project seeks to make visible how the visual arts and women artists have looked at our unequal relationship with the planet to make us reflect on an equitable future.
(In Spanish)
Las artistas mujeres a lo largo de la historia se han visto y aun se ven enfrentadas a distintos y constantes desafíos y discriminaciones. La misión de MIA Art Collection siempre ha sido incrementar la visibilidad de artistas visuales. Nuestra fundadora, Alejandra Castro Rioseco, ha demostrado que nuestra característica más importante es nuestra habilidad y compromiso de coleccionar y visualizar, de manera exclusiva, el trabajo de artistas mujeres.
Estamos orgullosas de colaborar con la feria de arte JUSTMAD para nuestra siguiente exhibición. MIA Art Collection y JUSTMad presentan Ni La Tierra ni las Mujeres, una exposición de mujeres artistas que trabajan sobre la preocupación global por la emergencia climática y la relación desigual ser-humano naturaleza. Sus obras abordan cuestiones tan diversas como la rapidez de un sistema que agota al planeta, la observación de la naturaleza como el lugar para descansar, reflexionar, volver a nuestro origen, o cómo sería el futuro si la simbiosis naturaleza ser-humano fuera una realidad biológica.
Female-identifying artists everywhere face countless challenges in and out of the art world. MIA Collection’s mission has been to increase the visibility of female artists everywhere. Based both in Dubai and New York and collecting internationally, our founder, Alejandra Castro Rioseco, has made it our defining characteristic to exclusively collect and promote female artists.
For our team and for people everywhere, COVID-19 has drastically changed the professional and personal landscape. To adapt to this situation, we have launched a new initiative which has brought our collection online. As a team, we decided to launch an online museum, MIA Anywhere, where we showcase works from both our permanent collection as well as by visiting artists. After only three weeks running, we have featured the work of female artists from Iran to Chile, Brazil to Spain.
We are delighted to announce that this upcoming week we will be hosting the first retrospective exhibition, and first virtual exhibition, of the late Argentinian artist, Martha Boto (1925-2004). We will be featuring an exciting number of never previously exhibited works by the artist. Boto has been a central figure in our permanent collection and we are immensely excited to share this first retrospective exhibition with the public.
MARTHA BOTO, “Sans Titre”, (1998). Mixed media on board. 100 x 130 cm.
Martha Boto’s work resides in collections internationally, from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in Israel. Her work has also been exhibited in several museums across the globe, from Centre Pompidou in Paris to Museo del Barrio in New York City.
MARTHA BOTO, “Eveil 1”, (1993). Mixed media, metal and relief. 40 x 40 cm.
Abstraction and geometry are at the core of Boto’s work. She was a key member of the kinetic art movement both in the Latin American and in the global context, participating in exhibitions and pushing the boundaries of geometry and abstraction everywhere. Her work and research focused on the optical variations of light and color, often juxtaposing static and mobile reliefs. Working with different mediums and materials, she has pioneered the ways in which we experience light physically and intellectually. Inspired by her personal fascination with the cosmos, Boto brought a futuristic vision to her art, constantly experimenting to test the relationships between light, movement, space, time and color.
MARTHA BOTO, “Sans Titre”, (1976). Mixed media. 67 x 45 x 8 cm.
“I have always been fascinated by the laws of harmony and equilibrium which govern the cosmos through interrelations of light and movement, space, time, and color”
MARTHA BOTO
Boto’s work influenced not only the visual arts but science, literature and technology, as well. Her work, often described as science fiction, furthered the notion that all of these fields could intersect. Boto’s career began in Argentina, where she joined the country’s first abstract art movements and worked mostly on painting. She later founded the research and art collective Artistas No Figurativos de la Argentina in 1957 and shortly after she moved to Paris and took part in the first Biennale of Paris in 1960. Upon her arrival in Paris she began experimenting heavily with kinetics, adding motors and lights to her sculptural practice, resulting on her first Kinetic Light Boxes. In the 1970’s, however, Boto returned to painting. Throughout her life, her art always pushed boundaries and tested the intersections of different fields as she allowed her creativity lead the way.
MARTHA BOTO, “Emersion 3”, (1984). Acrylic on canvas. 73 x 60 cm.
It is fitting to host Martha Boto’s first retrospective exhibition online as her work existed at the intersection of technology, science and art. We are both humbled and excited to bring this exhibition to the public this Monday, April 26, 2020. We hope that our efforts to bring together the public and the entire artistic community bring meaning and solace in times of such heavy uncertainty.
Noemí Iglesias (Asturias 1987), is an artist who defines herself working with sculptural media and long-term performance formats, is a clear example of contemporary nomadism: since 2009 Noemí has lived and worked in Greece, England, Finland, Italy and Hungary.
Dulce Pinzón was born in Mexico City in 1974. She studied Mass Media Communications at the Universidad de Las Americas in Puebla Mexico and Photography at Indiana University in Pennsylvania. In 1995 she moved to New York where she studied at The International Center of Photography.
MIA ART COLLECTION, in collaboration with MOLAA Museum of Latin American Artists presents “HER LAND” EXHIBITION, displayed in Dubai Festival City´s emblematic Festival Tower, 30th panoramic floor.
