SELF ON STAGE
The Perfect Woman is a Lie II, 2023, 150 x 300 cm, adhesive Easy Dot sheet, side specific installation, museum edition 1/1, Museum Goch, Goch, Germany.
Figure for the Base of a Crucifixion #29, #27, #28, #26, (front and back views), 4 x 80 x 240 cm PVC sheets, side-specific installation, museum edition 1/1, Museum Goch, Goch, Germany.
Figure for the Base of a Crucifixion #26, #28, #27, #29, (front and back views), 4 x 80 x 240 cm PVC sheets, side-specific installation, museum edition 1/1, Museum Goch, Goch, Germany.
SELF ON STAGE
On Instagram, the hashtag "selfstaging" is interpreted with considerable latitude, embraced not least by women for whom the mere flicker of a smile, held for a fraction of a second, already counts as a staging of the self.
How much greater the gravity attached to this notion in art, and how much greater the labor invested in it, has been borne out for more than half a century by what is, somewhat reductively, called "feminist photography."
Acting simultaneously as model, camerawoman, and director — and responsible, beyond that, for costume, props, and light — women artists since the end of the Second World War have answered the role imposed upon them from without with haunting visual metaphors, tracing a search for self-liberation that at times carried them to the very edge of self-destruction.
In their staged tableaux, they bound, wrapped, or contorted their bodies in defiance of the beauty ideal's dictates within a world shaped by men.
That artists from Brazil to the GDR arrived, independently, at strikingly similar pictorial solutions to their shared condition speaks not of a poverty of imagination, but bears witness to a deeply felt bitterness — one for which they sought to forge the starkest, most unflinching images imaginable, whether by winding cord and string tightly around their own faces, or by pressing their bodies into nets, cages, and bizarre costumes.
In the age of social media, the staging of the female self has become a practice that has little to do with the emancipatory concerns of earlier generations. What has happened since then?
An exhibition about the self-staging of women in contemporary art.
Participating artists:
Kirsten Becken · Kincsö Bede · Elina Brotherus · Susan Copich · Rachel Feinstein · Mariane Foissey · Melanie Issaka · Cloe Jancis · Susanne Junker · Tarrah Krajnak · Lia Sophie Laukant · Michala Norup · Loreal Prystaj · Grit Reiss · Alicia Rodriguez Alvisa · Nina Röder · Kourtney Roy · Corinne Rusch · Emma Sarpaniemi · Annegret Soltau · Martina Stapf · Lilith Terra · Isabelle Wenzel
Curated by Freddy Langer
06.09.2026 - 15.11.2026
Museum Goch
Kastellstraße 9
47574 Goch
Germany