The prism of the feminine: machine, oocytes, threads, potions

The exhibition “The prism of the feminine”, general theme of the sixteenth edition of Drawing Now art fair, is a gendered look at contemporary drawing, through practices attributed to women, as well as areas where women have had a crucial, although invisible, contribution, such as technology.

For example, the invention of the computer is often credited to Charles Babbage, obliterating the role of the mathematician Ada Lovelace, who, fascinated by the punch card technique of mechanized looms by Joseph Marie Jacquard, developed a protocomputer, becoming the first programmer in history. This unexpected relationship between textiles and digital wefts, a work of the grid and the line, evokes traditionally feminine knowledge. In addition, a woman’s body is often the subject of ideations relating to her sexuality and childbirth.

Inviting Sarah Tritz (born in Paris in 1980), Antoine Medes (born in Mont-Saint-Aignan in 1994) and Louise Aleksiejew (born in Caen in 1994) to react to this theme means opening the exhibition space to different generations of artists who thus enrich a feminism that is sometimes heteronormative or academic. A queer, or fifth-generation feminist gaze, is therefore at work here to produce an exhibition that emanates from exchanges of points of view and fluid identities that are rethinking and reorganizing themselves.
The drawing is a constructed image, a look at the other and the world, often with a relationship of authority between the one who evaluates and the one who is evaluated, or even valued according to parameters that are foreign to him. What happens to drawing when the artist’s gaze does not align with the objects of interest of a patriarchal iconography? And what happens to this reimagined life?

So we decided together that the exhibition space would be a kind of Drag of the domestic space, considered as a space of power of women by most capitalist cultures – a delirious and deconstructed space, breaking this idea of power returning to women but also to minority sexual identities only in a private and therefore limited sphere.

Joana P.R Neves, curator of the exhibition