FEMINIST CONQUEERORS: A PLAYGROUND
an exhibition by COVEN BERLIN
we want to grow, learn, create, play, perform and share
COVEN BERLIN presents its first exhibition, FEMINIST CONQUEERORS: A PLAYGROUND, from March 21st to 29th at Kleiner Salon.
Opening: 21st of March, 7pm
Performances: 8pm
Location: Kleiner Salon, Manteuffelstrasse 42, 10997 Berlin
Playgrounds have a strong influence in the early stages of our lives. Society, family and friends teach us the concept of “norm” before we even know the definition of gender or care about the color of our clothes. Eventually, the stereotypes and narrow views imposed to us during this time of self-definition hit us hard, inducing confusion and insecurity. FEMINIST CONQUEERORS: A PLAYGROUND, conceived as a feminist playground for people of all ages, aims to put this absurdity into light by deconstructing it.
Feminism is more often than not considered either obsolete, time wasting or elitist, and associated with angry, humorless and dry female activists or intellectuals. The exhibition aims to create an open space where people can interact with artworks and other people, as well as engage playfully with various topics on feminism, sexuality and gender.
FEMINIST CONQUEERORS: A PLAYGROUND is curated by COVEN BERLIN‘s founders Lo Pecado and Judy Mièl and art director Lalou Rousseau. It brings together works by various artists and contributors active in this sex-positive transdisciplinary gender-bending collective and online magazine.
The exhibition will present artworks by Eve Tagny, A. Liparoto, Esther Nelke, Janet Morales, Goodyn Green and Jessica Polar among others.
Special events such as screenings, performances and talks around the themes of female body and sexuality, intimacy and love, beauty and media, postcolonialism and feminism, language and gender, and sexual orientation and representation, will take place throughout the week.
Join the official event on Facebook!
PROGRAM
Friday, March 21st – THE OPENING
Come and play with us!
Opening: 6pm – 11pm
The Unesthetician by Lo Pecado
This public waxing station aims to make the visitor think critically about the unspoken laws of hair removal imposed on women* in Western society. The Unesthetician tries to playfully defy the social taboos and secrecy around female body hair.
The visitors are an active part in this Salón de Antiestética. Volunteers will get their legs waxed in front of an audience and their hairs will get a place of honor in the exhibition. The secret is unveiled and the painful mechanics of femininity are exposed to the public.
Lo Pecado also attempts to establish an intimate -almost erotic- link with the volunteers based on the vulnerability and trust dynamics of waxing.
Free Haircuts by Lalou Rousseau
The artist and non-professional hairdresser will offer free queer haircuts to whomever wants to sit in the chair.
Looking for Love by Frances Breden
A dating booth, with the artist on one side and an audience member on the other. They are free to interact with her however they please, but she can only communicate by saying lines from a Cosmo magazine in front of her. A Cosmo magazine is also available for them to use as they see fit. This piece tries to create authentic moments within the rigid gender, sex, and love narratives of Cosmo magazine. The dialogue between the artist and the audience member will mirror dialogues between feminism and mainstream culture, and reflect the universal inner fight to distinguish our authentic selves from our cultural constraints.
DJs, glitter and much more!
Saturday, March 22nd
Opening hours: 4pm – 11pm
Interactive Poetic Space by Estefanía Cuero
In the Interactive Poetic Space inspirational sources are offered by the artist and it contains an opportunity to read and listen to poems, and most important, the possibility to create a new poetical composition. Whoever would like to share this expression will get the opportunity by exhibiting their works afterwards until the closing of Feminist Conqueerors: A Playground.
Time: 4pm
Language: ES, EN, DE
Sprachspiel by Lalou Rousseau & Kostas Sioutas
Sprachspiel is a visual and linguistic experimentation on the role of gender in various languages and grammars, and on how it affects the perception, understanding and biases of those who speak them.
Time: 7pm
Language: FR, EN, DE
Feminist Quiz by Marta Millet and Lucía Barahona
Where was Judith Butler born? Who is the youngest of the three Brönte sisters? Where did Virginia Woolf’s room, depicted in her masterpiece A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN, really stand? If you think you know the answers to these questions… Good! If you think these questions are too silly… Good! Because this quiz is going to be much more serious. It goes without saying, although it has just been said.
Time: 9pm
Language: EN, DE
Sunday, March 23rd
Opening hours: 4pm – 11pm
Con la pata quebrada (Barefoot and in the Kitchen) by Diego Galán
This documentary composed of fragments of films reflects on how women have been viewed by Spanish cinema since the 30s until today. Con la pata quebrada was presented in the Cannes Classics section at the Cannes Film Festival. Don’t miss it if you are into Spanish kitsch and folklore!
Time: 8pm
Duration: 83min
Language: ES with EN subtitles
Monday, March 24th
Opening hours: 5pm – 10pm
Interactive Poetic Space by Estefanía Cuero
Time: 5pm
Language: ES, EN, DE
Feminist Tentacle Porn Talk by Lo-Fi Cherry Porno Pics
Åslög, founder of the indie-porn label Lo-Fi Cherry Porno Pics (LFCPP), explains the feminist potentials of Japanese porn genre tentacle porn. LFCPP is currently producing a web series of feminist tentacle porn shorts about monster vaginas and human desires. Apart from spitting vulvas, female sexuality and “the blind gaze”, this talk is about how to conquer a field initially invented to exclude you. After the talk, there will be a screening of the science-fiction porn short Space Labia by Lo-Fi Cherry Porno Pics, which has been nominated to the Feminist Porn Award 2014.
Time: 7pm
Language: EN
Tuesday, March 25th
Opening hours: 6pm – 10pm
This is what Third World Women look like by Angie Kohon
The workshop will offer a short input on some feminist de-colonialist theories (and theorists) and share some anecdotes and experiences with women of the Global South.
From this non so-academic perspective (since academy had been traditionally colonised), the workshop aims to generate an open debate on how mainstream feminism should grow more sensitive about its ‘colonialist move’ (Chandra Mohanty) and start paying much more attention to the intersectionalities of discrimination and oppression.
Time: 7pm
Language: EN,ES
Africa and the Elephant by Vicky Germain
Video images of a remembered conversation at your everyday commercial market. A day in the Life of Germany.
Time: 8:00pm
Language: EN, DE
Time, action and resistance of Latin American women by Abya Yala Women Group
In times of colonization and enslavement of our people many indigenous, black, and «mestizo» women opposed to the domination of the invaders, created armies and fought for freedom. Today, despite the alleged independence of Latin America, these struggles for the defense of territory and autonomy remain. This is the topic of the short documentation-installation made with portraits of Latin American women fighters, their voices, their music, their poems and their legacy.
Time: 9pm
Language: ES
Thursday, March 27th
Opening hours: 4pm – 11pm
Interactive Poetic Space by Estefanía Cuero
In the Interactive Poetic Space inspirational sources are offered by the artist and it contains an opportunity to read and listen to poems, and most important, the possibility to create a new poetical composition. Whoever would like to share this expression will get the opportunity by exhibiting their works afterwards until the closing of Feminist Conqueerors: A Playground.
Time: 4pm
Language: ES, EN, DE
Lovewell by Louise Trueheart
Love is easy and can be created. It exists in the fabric of the world. It exists in contexts we deem devoid of love. It exists if you want it to. In LOVEWELL, I invite audience members to participate in one-on-one performances. This is a form of research that explores the ways, shapes, varieties and experiences of giving and receiving love.
The meat of each performance is physical contact. The challenge is the discomfort of intimacy, our individual relationship to love, and whether the answer to the above questions is YES.
The Unesthetician by Lo Pecado
This public waxing station aims to make the visitor think critically about the unspoken laws of hair removal imposed on women* in Western society. The Unesthetician tries to playfully defy the social taboos and secrecy around female body hair.
The visitors are an active part in this Salón de Antiestética. Volunteers will get their legs waxed in front of an audience and their removed hairs will get a place of honor in the exhibition. The secret is unveiled and the painful mechanics of femininity are exposed to the public.
Lo Pecado also attempts to establish an intimate -almost erotic- link with the volunteers based on the vulnerability and trust dynamics of waxing.
Free Haircuts by Lalou Rousseau
The artist and non-professional hairdresser will offer free queer haircuts to whomever wants to sit in the chair.
Friday, March 28th
Opening hours: 6pm – 11pm
Sexism in Music Videos by Sol Fauquier
Pop stars. Every teenager looks up to them. They want to be like them, look like them, behave like them. What are the teenagers really looking at when they absorb those images? Objectification of women’s bodies in pop culture is not only happening in videos by male singers. Female singers are reinforcing it by presenting themselves to the world as sexual objects, more than professional singers. We will take a look into the evolution of some music videos performed by women from the 80’s until today.
Time: 7pm
Language: EN, DE
Want Some Oranges by Goodyn Green
Screening of feminist porn short Want Some Oranges and Q&A with the film maker and actresses Sadie Lune and Zoë Challenger. Goodyn Green’s first short porn sheds a different light on queer sex during pregnancy. Watch and enjoy debut porn actress, Zoë Challenger, and 8 months pregnant Sadie Lune in action. The short premiered at the Porn Film Festival Berlin in October 2013.
Time: 9pm
Language: EN
Free Haircuts by Lalou Rousseau
The artist and non-professional hairdresser will offer free queer haircuts to whomever wants to sit in the chair.
Saturday, March 29th
Opening hours: 4pm – 11pm
EVERYTHING IS FOR SALE, EVEN OUR SOULS: Fleamarket for Fundings
Performances:
Tejedoras de vida (Weavers of life) by Abya Yala Women Group
This is a play about five Latin-American women fighters who have been killed, persecuted, threatened and/or kidnapped for fighting against the colonial oppression. These women, on stage, make a monolog about their experiences, their pain, their death and their resistance. Bartolina Sisa, Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, Digna Ochoa, Ana Fabrizia Córdoba and Millaray Huichailaf raise their voices against the silence and the forgetfulness.
Time: 7pm
Language: ES
What if We Dig Under the Bed by Shelley Etkin
This performance is an invitation to feel free and get dirty. The piece offers a durational improvisation practice of body presence, movement, and voice. Dirt meets skin and sound. Dirt has held great significance throughout time, as the site of death and life buried bodies and rotting food regenerating into a space for planting and growth. The rich complexities of this natural material come also with stigmas and associations regarding sexuality and wildness.
The performance is an open exploration of the visceral senses & potentiality of haptic communication. The connection is made felt and visible through imprints of dirt on skin and cloth. Dig under the bed: what can be unearthed, discovered, and germinate?
Time: 9pm
Language: EN
ONGOING EXHIBITION
Series: “Subject: The Grid” by Eve T
1) > > > Subject: Re: IMG00937-20121201-2259.jpg
2) Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange
3) Subject: RE: Last One
Fragments of an intimate relationship reenacted through the exchange of cybersexual material. Displayed for everyone to see, in perfect grids from which is revealed a profound disjunction between the female and the male’s perception of sexuality. The absurdity of similar gestures and pictures, some completely lacking aesthetics considerations, repeated over and over, exchanged via sterile technology is captured, transformed and rendered into playful motifs.
At least 2-3 minutes on average
Part I – ‘What you see and what you get’ Series by Andrew Liparoto
shush-shush-shush-shush
aha-aha-aha-aha
shush-shush-shush-shush
aha-aha-aha-aha
swisha-swisha-swisha-swisha
shush-shush-shush-shush
aha-aha -aha-aha
shush-shush-shush-shush
aha-aha -aha-aha
drip
shush-shush-shush-shush
drip, drip, drip, blop
shush-shush-shush-shush
drip, blop, blop, blop
aha-aha -aha-aha
shush-shush-shush-shush
spit. spit. click.
(wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle)
Man of Action by Goodyn Green
The celebrated queer photographer Goodyn Green presents a photo series of intimate moments with the ever so dirty Action Man.
DARM Manifesto by Esther Nelke
Darm aims to expose the repression of female anger and negative emotions in the Western society, how the politics of appropriateness and cuteness enforce a twisted and stifling behavior. The expressions of violence are paralyzed, preserved forever in artificial poses, forced to become “cute” and non threatening.
Going Commercial by Janet Zoë Morales
Going Commercial is part of an artistic research project that explores the various roles of exploitation of females in particular and human beings in general. The two photographs have been the starting research entry to reflect on the social arrangements and the current notions of gender exploitation in our present society.
Role Models by Judy Mièl
Role Models aims to delve into the visitors’ gender-based assumptions and preconceptions with a playful approach. They will be able to design their own fictional characters with provided “genderless” descriptions and will have the chance to encounter their (mostly unconcious) expectations on what people should look like based on apparently gender neutral parameters.
Fuck or Fight by Kiona H Niehaus and Frances Breden
This video installation is a cheeky mashup of the most objectifying shots in contemporary Hollywood films with camcorder parodies. The absurd and iconic spectacles of Megan Fox’s flowing hair, Vin Diesel’s rippling muscles, Edward Cullen’s sparkling chest – our visual culture is so saturated with these images that they leave us numb. What images evoke emotions of lust, hunger, drama, and longing in a world bored by the silver screen? We aim to offer an alternative.
Andr and Gyné by Jessica Polar
“Andr and Gyné” is a series of images about Androgyny in actual fashion and how sexual ambiguity is often seen in editorials and magazines like Vogue, Bello, Out100 or Dossier. Derived from Ancient Greek, andr (man) and gyné (woman) here you will find the non-gender, the agender, the neutral gender models.
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