ArtMeant* Project

Author:Buket Bal Soezeri

On May 22nd, the exhibition “Her Story” opened at Galerie Sechs | Basel. This exhibition focuses on the stories of women who are very different from each other, but who share a common experience of resistance and renewal. With its layered structure, the exhibition creates a multi-voiced dialogue with the audience.

With the participation of 11 artists, each one creates his/her own unique way of expression through different mediums and practices.

“Her Story” also goes beyond a single way of representation. Through its curatorial approach, it invites the audience on a multidimensional journey between the personal and shared worlds of the artists. While exploring the artists’ inner experiences, it also makes visible how these experiences connect, cross, or separate from the outside world.

This layered structure reminds us of the feminist art historian Griselda Pollock and her important critiques of traditional art history. As Pollock explains, classic art history often connects the idea of “the artist” with male genius and makes women artists invisible in history.¹ Feminist art history tries not only to bring forgotten women back into the story, but also to change the way history is written.²
“Her Story” is a contemporary example of this change. It invites us to rethink both the position of women artists in history and their role in today’s art world.

This exhibition, which becomes a kind of poetic narrative about fragility and strength, also shows us a beautiful example of female solidarity. As Pollock says:
*“The presence of women artists is not only a struggle to exist, but also an act that questions how that struggle is represented and remembered.”*³

In a history that has systematically erased women including in art  this exhibition leaves a meaningful note for the future. (At this point, we must also think about how patriarchal thinking still defines the roles of women in everyday life.)

“Her Story” opens a space where women’s voices are not silenced, but instead, where they can touch and speak to each other freely.

In this sense, “Her Story” is not only an exhibition, but also a meaningful mission both intellectually and physically.

It invites the audience to think, feel, and question and this perspective can be deeply experienced through “Her Story”.

As ArtMeant Project, we are also happy to announce that in the coming weeks, we will be hosting the artists of Her Story to speak with them about their works and artistic journeys.

This gathering is not just about womanhood, not just about art. It is an act of opening space a call for the voice, the trace, the question, and the resistance of women.

Notes:
1. Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art, Routledge, 1988.
(“The individualism of which the artist is a prime symbol is gender exclusive…”)

2. Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories, Routledge, 1999.
(“Feminist rewriting of the history of art… locate gender relations as a determining factor…”)

3. Griselda Pollock, “Feminist Interventions in Art’s Histories”, in Vision and Difference, Routledge, 1988.
(Paraphrased: The presence of women artists is a fight for visibility and how that fight is remembered.)