FEMINISM CORPOREAL/ՖԵՄԻՆԻԶՄԸ՝ ՄԱՐՄՆԱ(ԻՐԱ)ԿԱՆ

The Cafesjian Center for the Arts hosts FEMINISM CORPOREAL exhibition at Sasuntsi Davit Garden Gallery. The exhibition is organized in the frames of FEMINISM CORPOREAL International Festival Curator: Susanna Gyulamiryan Co-curator of the Festival: FemLibrary Armenia Artists Gayane Cholakyan Anush Ghukasyan Armine Hovhannisyan Inna Kolupaeva Karine Matsakyan lucine talalyan Manan Torosyan FEMINISM CORPOREAL Exhibition II The preeminence of dominant male-chauvinist interpretations of women’s art endured for so many long years that it established a massive grip on the pages of Soviet-Armenian cultural historiography. This ‘state of the art’ perpetuated its unquestioned legitimacy up until approximately the second half of the post-Soviet 1990s; a period that marked the abandonment of the grand Soviet narratives and compulsory topics, and saw the introduction of feminist and gender studies, which in their critical conceptual insights allowed deconstructions within the traditional apparatus of thought and in the methodological presuppositions underlying the prevailing, patriarchal art history discourses. This momentum also opened a door for some particularly interested female artists, curators, and critics in Armenia to pursue a new agenda of cultural and critical analysis of self determinations as well as new politics of representation which, among other things, was also calibrated around the conceptual nexus of 'woman and gender,' 'woman and feminism' and queerness. Female artists got a chance to change the traditional way female bodies were used as requisites in male works, and to bring forth questions related to politics of subjectivity and (self)representation. The paradigm of speaking with one’s own body was noticed in Armenia’s women’s art since the 2000s, manifested through the play, subversion and deconstruction of the traditional codes representing the naked body along with developments in the practices of discussing gender and feminism as an object of epistemological effort and protection of social, political commitment; the body ceases to be a mere spectacle but is transformed into an object of research. The first stage of the festival is launched with a series of exhibitions in which the polymorphism of the installations, canvases, sculptures, objects, photographs and video materials by female artists is ‘organized’ as a corpus of female subjectivity in which the imaginary of self-identification is problematized, the personal mechanism of deep emotional feelings of the self which is permanently forced to be annexed to the systems of limitations and oppression, sex- and gender-based exclusion, violence, subjugation and all social consequences they result in. This ‘exhibition-laboratory’ questioning the notion of gender is conceived to disturb cultural and normative standards and stereotypes, and clear space within the Armenian art scene for feminist and gender studies through distortions, and the denial of the patriarchal and dominant forms of sexuality.