Curating Art for Antirape and Ecofeminist Movements: A Conversation with Monika Fabijanska

Abstract

Curating Art for Antirape and Ecofeminist Movements:A Conversation with Monika Fabijanska Michael Dango (bio) and Monika Fabijanska (bio) When ARIELLA AZOULAY asked, "Has anyone ever seen a photograph of rape?" she wanted to know about a visual economy of representations: which images are or are not allowed into public circulation. Images of murder, traffic accidents, and even school shootings are unfortunately ubiquitous in news broadcasts and Hollywood blockbusters. But not images of rape. For AZOULAY, this lack enforces a toxic commonsense about women's bodies: it maintains a visual culture in which women are available to be violated or are violated already; it leaves women unable to recognize rape when it happens to them; and it removes the grounds on which women can make "emergency claims" about sexual assault, claims that would activate political discussion rather than private therapy for a social group denied the status of a political class.1 Contributing images of rape is not the best or only feminist means of disrupting this visual economy and its political consequences. Indeed, graphic images of sexual violence tend to sensationalize rape rather than ending it, like Gaspar Noé's ten-minute long take of a brutal assault in Irréversible (2004). Perhaps for this [End Page 441] reason, when in 2018 Monika Fabijanska curated one of the most expansive art exhibitions devoted to representations of rape in contemporary U.S. women's art, The Unheroic Act, she made sure she was not inviting viewers into a "house of horrors." The exhibition—which was widely hailed by the New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Art in America, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, and Art Papers and ranked fifth on Hyperallergic's best shows of the year in New York City—demonstrated the range in which artists had interrupted a masculinist tradition of depicting rape as "heroic," not just by focusing on survivors but by multiplying the modes of response available to them: shocking, seeking revenge, healing, documenting, educating, and organizing. Two years later, Fabijanska's exhibition on ecofeminism(s) continued to break stereotypes about the work of ecologically engaged feminist artists. Here was work that was not just written in "small letters," as Fabijanska puts it, but said in a "big voice" that was both technologically innovative as well as intellectually rigorous.2 As curator of ecofeminism(s), Fabijanska exposed a range of ecological responses and unpacked the diversity of strategies internal to ecofeminist movements. In her selection, she constructed a genealogy of resonance across artists: including an established cohort of recognizable names such as Ana Mendieta, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and even Barbara Kruger; up-and-coming artists like Bilge Friedlaender; and emergent artists such as Eliza Evans, Carla Maldonado, Jessica Segall, and Hanae Utamura. The Unheroic Act offered similar points of entry to audiences seeking feminist interventions in the visual culture surrounding rape. Fabijanska reframed the work of foundational feminist artists such as Suzanne Lacy, Yoko Ono, Senga Nengudi and Kara Walker with the paths taken after by younger artists such as Roya Amigh, Bang Geul Han and Naima Ramos-Chapman. Although trained as an art historian, Fabijanska came to curating after a decade as Poland's cultural attaché in New York (2000–2010), where she served as director of the Polish Cultural Institute. She saw as one of her charges "bringing the most cutting-edge and sophisticated of Poland's culture to the U.S., which was largely unknown here."3 In that position, she curated a multidisciplinary program of close to a hundred projects a year, by initiating and copresenting them at institutions across the country, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Jewish Museum, BAM–Brooklyn Academy of Music, La MaMa, the Lincoln Center, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the [End Page 442] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Jessica Segall, A Thirsty Person, Having Found a Spring, Stops to Drink, Does Not Contemplate Its Beauty (2011). Performance/video still, archival print. ©2011 Jessica Segall. Courtesy of the artist. UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. The most important of her initiatives was the retrospective Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955–1972, organized by Connie Butler at MoMA in...