The exhibition “Golden Notebooks. Women in Art and Art History”, whose title is inspired by a work by the writer Doris Lessing, places works by international female artists in relation to art historical readings of gender criticism.
The starting point for the exhibition is the first women’s art historians’ conference in the GDR, which took place in November 1989 and was then largely ignored in the discourse of feminist art historiography. The questions discussed there on the correspondences and differences between readings of feminist art as well as their preconditions, interests and perspectives touch on fundamental issues of gender-critical art history.
Works by international female artists and artist couples from different generations and spheres of activity are now combined in the exhibition with a re-reading of themes from early women’s art history and supplemented by video interviews with female protagonists of the time. They make it clear once again that there was and is no uniform understanding of feminist thought, neither in the East nor in the West. However, there are projections shaped by experience that need to be examined retrospectively. The exhibition is also a plea for more visibility for women’s art, which is still not a matter of course.
