Lost Women Art

The Goethe-Institut Cyprus begins its GoetheKino: Questions of her Own series with the screening of LOST WOMEN ART, followed by a discussion with Christina Lambrou, art historian, and Ioulita Toumazi, art theorist, curator and writer, to create a meaningful link to the Cypriot context.

100 years of European Art History – reloaded and full-on female

Women have always written art history and worked on eye-level with their male contemporaries. Together they claimed new paths and caused sensations. But despite the fact that female artists’ works have always sold well and they always shaped artists’ circles, in art history they are rarely mentioned as trailblazers of new art styles. Up to this day women play only minor roles in the canon of art and if they are remembered at all, it is as “exceptions”. The consequences are far-reaching: On the art market women get paid significantly less and in the collections of museums, just five percent of the works are by female artists. How come? And why did female artists and their oeuvres fall into oblivion in the first place?

The two-part documentary LOST WOMEN ART by Susanne Radelhof explores the mechanisms of this systematic omission of highly talented artists and reveals the blank spaces of the art history, which was so clearly shaped by men. Together with art historians, museum educators and pioneering institutions that are all fighting for more recognition of female artists, the documentary tells their ground-breaking and moving stories. LOST WOMEN ART is an homage to great female art and visionary female artists – such as impressionist Berthe Morisot, front woman of the Russian avant-garde Natalia Gontscharowa or pioneer of abstraction Hilma af Klint. Unknown names like that of Germaine Krull, photographer of the new vision, or pop artist Kiki Kogelnik, stand alongside those of nowadays recognized artists, such as painter Lotte Laserstein or the radically feminist artist VALIE EXPORT.

And just like that the two-part documentary LOST WOMEN ART invites to join in (re)discovering the female avant-garde, to be astonished and last but not least, to re-think art history.

Part 1: From impressionism to abstraction (52 minutes)
Part 2: From new vision to the feminist avant-garde (52 minutes)

Both parts will be screened on the same evening.