Art Calendar – Current Exhibitions in Germany

One day aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway there meet a Broadway singer, a senior teacher, an ethnologist and a backpacker. That the four characters from Ulrike Ottinger’s film Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia (Joan of Arc of Mongolia) (1989) are women is no accident. Since the mid-1970s film and art has reflected the discourse on feminism, which received its theoretical foundation in the 1990s with gender studies. It was also in the nineties that Ingvild Goetz began to collect media art. Now the fifth exhibition of works from the Goetz Collection may be seen in the Munich House of Art. And this time the focus lies on works of media art that treat feminism.

In addition to Ulrike Ottinger, the exhibition includes, for instance, Rosemarie Trockel. In her Fan 1–6 from 2000, various women slip into the role of the actress Brigitte Bardot. In 1987 the Australian artist Tracey Moffatt created a counter project to a paradox of the film industry: although at the time women were very much present in films, the roles they embodied rarely determined the plot. In Moffatt’s film Nice Coloured Girls, this is different: three Australian Aborigine women take centre stage. The passive role is played by a drunken white man, whom the three women christen “Captain”.