Vienna. »City of Women« was written in large letters on two partitions framing the video works, slide projects and posters by Stefanie Seibold in the Kunsthalle Exnergasse. Further back in the darkened room was a similar, black-box-like installation of partitions, in which Penelope Georgiou presented two of her films as well as two posters, one of them referring to one of her exhibitions and the other announcing a film that is still to be made.
The strict spatial separation of the two artists’ works in the exhibition space was off-putting – after all, the press release had stated that the plan was to have a »productive, confrontative exhibition of the works of two artists from different generations who engage with the themes of performance, theatrality, experimental film, video, installations, improvisations etc., and who, despite all the differences between the various works, also show their remarkable affinities.«
At the exhibition itself, however, the exhibition design did much less to highlight the affinities than to show at a glance that, even in a »City of Woman«, one can meet with the widest variety of feminist positions: for, while Stefanie Seibold draws explicitly on a feminist tradition of art and theory in all her works, Penelope Georgiou presented her »Tierschutzfilm« - an advertisement that was shown in cinemas as well in 1997 – and her latest film, »Sonate in A Dur«. A trained actress, Georgiou takes on several roles in both films, and, with both films, she leaves the viewers feeling strangely baffled: a setting redolent of David Lynch films, in which Georgiou appears once as a man, then as a woman, and finally as a child, has somehow – according to the title – to be connected with protection of animals (Ger.: Tierschutz), while the film »Sonate in A Dur« is based on Plato’s »Parmenides«, a seemingly abstruse dialogue on the dialectic of »the One« and »the Other«. Georgiou herself and her partner appear in it in three different roles, in which they reflect on the text’s meaning or lack thereof in seemingly endless repetitions.
As in her »Tierschutzfilm«, however, it is not so much the content as the confusion of the viewers caused by the unconventional performance and presentation that was meant to open up a one-dimensional readability of media messages and representations to allow a variety of readings. Georgiou brings about a shift in fixed fields of meaning at the visual level by means of a split screen, and this is also one of the objectives linking her works with those of Seibold. While Georgiou does not by any means want to conclude the process of the production of meaning in her works, Seibold places familiar signs, gestures and images in a queer, lesbian context in a bid to charge them with queer content beyond their usual »heteronormative« interpretation. On the posters belonging to her three-part series »A Reader – A Visual Archive«, which functions like a pin board, she brings together many different image and text sources: fliers from lesbian bars, titles of feminist books and exhibitions, concert tickets or just words like »cunt«, »role models« or »play«. In between, there are pictures by Caravaggio, a marble statue by Bernini, and icons of gay and lesbian culture from Hubert Fichte to Missy Elliot, as well as two paintings by Holbein and Giorgione, which Seibold describes in an inscription on the back as being two of her favourite pictures.
The portraits of the two confident-looking women were also present in the exhibition as large silk-screen prints and as part of the slide show »Bilder/Vorbilder«, which, following Aby Warburg, was dedicated to the archival of the most important gestures and behaviours of »queer culture«.
With the performance »I am not half the man I used to be«, the artist proved that a line from the song »Yesterday« by the Beatles, in an ironic form, is able to confirm lesbian experiences. Setting out from a text by Mary Ann Doane about »The Woman’s Film of the 1940s«, in which Doane discusses the (im)possibility of a »female gaze«, the performer Tara Casey not only hurls a quote from the theoretical text at the viewers, but also raps out the gender-specific constitution of her gaze. In a rejection of monolithic concepts of the audience, Seibold also places it in a social context to highlight its involvement in the production of meaning: the viewers are to be seen from behind not only in this work, but also in the video »What you see is what you get«, a re-collocation of scenes from the legendary lesbian film »The Killing of Sister George« by Robert Aldrich. Penelope Georgiou is, despite the performative devices and strategies which could classify her works as belonging to feminist art, far removed from such an unambiguously queer positioning. However, the exhibition showed clearly how she also directs attention to the reading in order to highlight potentially subversive productions of meaning and to express her dissatisfaction with the prevailing rules of the art world, while also demonstrating how a humorous approach to heteronormativity links the works of the two artists.
Translated by Timothy Jones