Elena Mendizabal studied Fine Arts from 1977 to 1982 with classmates such as Juan Luis Moraza, Maria Luisa Fernández and Txomin Badiola, among other artists. Although she specialised in painting, she had already been producing works of an objectual nature since 1982. She had her first solo exhibition during that year, comprising works influenced by the notion of tautology and sculptural use of the word. She produced her first proper sculptures in 1985, biomorphic works recalling furniture, landscapes and animals. She created works of a constructive nature from 1987 to 1992, returning the language of what became known as “Basque sculpture” once again back to furniture and figuration, using lights, wallpaper, mirrors, glass and polychromy. This period began with two pairs of iron works from 1986 –Melena and Valla, which are romantic and melancholic– and the “casetas” (huts), which are truly constructive in nature. After completing her thesis in 1993, which was influenced by the importance of the image in studying sculpture, she created works using photographs of previous sculptures. Since that time, her works have been characterised by a variety of “languages”, materials and procedures, with each exhibition intuitively responding and referring to her life moment. They are like units in a series that sometimes looks backwards to return in new ways to previously treated forms. In her opinion, she is an artist of “images” (figures, analogies, metaphors) rather than language.

Beatriz Herráez was trained in Art History and Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country, she has been the Director of Artium, Basque Museum-Centre of Contemporary Art since December 2018.

She has curated many collective and monographic exhibitions, including those dedicated to Itziar Okariz, Julia Spínola, María Luisa Fernández, Susan Hiller, Erlea Maneros Zabala, Juan Luis Moraza and Néstor Sanmiguel Diest, all of which were staged in national and international spaces and institutions such as MARCO (Vigo), MUSAC (León), Azkuna Zentroa (Bilbao), CCI Tabakalera (Donostia-San Sebastián), Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (Móstoles), castillo/corrales (Paris), Sculpture Center (New York) and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS, Madrid). During 2007-2011, she was chief curator at Montehermoso Kulturunea, a pioneering project in implementing gender equality policies in the fields of contemporary art, thought and culture.

Member of the Advisory Council of Museums in the Basque Country and ADACE.

Amy Tobin is a lecturer in the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge, Curator of Exhibitions, Research and Events at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge and a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. She finished her PHD at the University of York, UK in 2017 with a thesis on art and feminism in the 1970s. Her research is published in journals such as British Art Studies, MIRAJ and Tate Papers, as well as in the edited books Collaboration and its (Dis)Contents, (Courtauld Books Online, 2017), Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s (IB Tauris, 2017), Feminism and Art History Now (IB Tauris, 2017) and A Companion to Feminist Art (Wiley Blackwell, 2019). She is also a co-editor of London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent and Ephemeral Networks 1960–1980 (Penn State University Press, 2018), with Jo Applin and Catherine Spencer, and The Art of Feminism (Chronicle and Tate, 2018), with Lucy Gosling, Helena Reckitt and Hilary Robinson. Amy is currently working on a monograph on feminism, art and sisterhood.

Sisterhood and Feminist Art
The Women's Liberation Movement of the 1970s advocated for the political power of sisterhood, but these relationships were rarely smooth. Groups formed and broke down, leading activists were trashed and excised from the organisations they founded and feminists fought over inclusivity and equality. In the connected Women’s Art Movement, debates around the agency of artists and the politics of representation created bad feeling between artists and critics, and fundamentally shaped the making, discussion and display of art. This talk maps some of these exchanges onto the lateral model of the sibling relation, articulating a feminist avant-garde and a more complex understanding of the call “Sisterhood is Powerful”.

Monica Bonvicini emerged as a visual artist and started exhibiting internationally in the mid-1990s. Her multifaceted practice, featuring drawing, sculpture, installation, video and photography, investigates the relationship between architecture, dispositifs of power, gender, space, surveillance and control, exploring political, social and institutional situations and their impact on society and artistic production. Her works question the meaning of making art, the ambiguity of language and the limits and possibilities attached to the ideal of freedom. Dry-humoured, direct, and imbued with historical, political and social references, Bonvicini’s art never refrains from establishing a critical connection with the sites where it is exhibited, the materials that comprise it and the roles of spectator and creator. Her work has been presented in many solo and group exhibitions, as well as in biennials around the world. She has won several awards, including the Hans Platschek Prize for Art and Writing (2019), the Rolandpreis für Kunst for Art in the Public from the Foundation Bremen (2013), the Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst from the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (2005) and the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale (1999). Also in the public real she has been creating iconic and permanent pieces such as RUN, at the Queen Elizabeth Park in London, or She Lies, on Bjørvika Fjord in front of the Oslo Opera House.Monica Bonvicini studied art in Berlin and at Cal Arts, Valencia, CA. From 2003 to 2018, she was lecturer in Performative Arts and Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where she shaped a new generation of relevant artists. Since 2017, she has assumed the professorship in Sculpture at the University of Fine Arts Berlin.

To Wall up: Ecstasy
Monica Bonvicini analyses modern architecture and its visions of ultimate transparency and order vis-à-vis psychoanalysis, deconstruction of gender roles and feminist politics. She critically dissects architecture as a male-dominated discipline in both an aesthetical and critical way, and with the irony and dry humour that characterise her artistic practice.
Bonvicini’s talk at Artium, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art focuses on some of her works that critically respond to gender inequality, discrimination and other forms of partial and patriarchal normativism – patterns of inappropriate politics that feminism fights with, engaging into discussions regarding the problematic mediation and visual representation of gender, male identity and its fierce entanglements with the capitalist state and the effects of such entanglement on the field of artistic production by non-male artists. It will also focus particularly on the relationship in her practice between elements such as titles, material and symbols of patriarchy, such as discipline, restraint, prudence, austerity and other virtues based on gender, sexuality, race, language and beliefs that have effectively structured and controlled society since the early modern. Present in the art scene since the mid-1990s, Bonvicini invites to a communitarian reflection on the evolution of the behaviours and symbols of the patriarchy in this field over the past 20 years.

Giovanna Zapperi is a Paris-based art historian and Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Tours. She was the Rudolf Arnheim Guest Professor at Humboldt University in Berlin (2007–2008) and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Nantes (2009) and French Academy in Rome at the Villa Medici (2013–2014), where she conducted extensive research on the art critic and writer Carla Lonzi. Zapperi’s articles have been published in various European languages and have appeared in a range of journals including Afterall, Art History, Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, e-flux journal, Feminist Review, MAY, Oxford Art Journal, Perspective, Studi Culturali and Texte zur Kunst. In 2009, she was presented the Gender Studies Award of the City of Paris for her PhD, which developed into a book entitled L’artiste est une femme. La modernité de Marcel Duchamp [The Artist is a Woman: Marcel Duchamp’s Modernity] published in 2012. Zapperi also co-authored Lo schermo del potere. Femminismo e regime della visibilità [The Screen of Power: Feminism and the Regime of Visibility], with Alessandra Gribaldo, and is the editor of the French edition of Carla Lonzi’s Autoritratto [Self-Portrait]. Her latest book examines the writings of art critic and radical Italian feminist Carla Lonzi: Carla Lonzi. Un’arte della vita [Carla Lonzi: An Art of Life] (Rome, 2017, French translation: Dijon 2018). Together with Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, she curated the exhibition Defiant Muses: Delphine Seyrig and Feminist Video Collectives in France, 1970s-1980s, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, (25 September 2019 to 23 March 2020).

Second-Wave Feminism and Refusal of Art: The Italian Way
This talk looks at feminist analysis of art as a patriarchal institution within the histories of Italian feminism in the 1970s, focusing on several women artists participating in feminist groups (particularly Rivolta Femminile [Feminine Revolt]) and on Carla Lonzi’s writings. A renowned art critic during the 1960s, Lonzi abandoned the art world in order to experiment alternative forms of life, creativity and being together, particularly via the feminist practice of autocoscienza (raising self-consciousness). While Lonzi argued for the refusal of art, artists such as Carla Accardi, Suzanne Santoro or Marcella Campagnano were interested instead in the radical potential of autocoscienza in redefining their own creative practice.

Elke Krasny, PhD, Professor of Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her scholarship focuses on critical practices in art, curating, architecture and urbanism addressing ecology, economy, labour, memory and feminisms. Since 2016, she has been curating a series of symposia on feminist curating together with colleagues Lara Perry and Dorothee Richter. Her exhibition Suzanne Lacy’s International Dinner Party in Feminist Curatorial Thought was shown at Zurich University of the Arts in 2015 and at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 2016. Her exhibition Hands-on Urbanism: The Right to Green was presented at the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture and then travelled internationally.
Edited volumes include Critical Care. Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet with Angelika Fitz (MIT Press, 2019), and In Reserve! The Household, with Regina Bittner (Spector Books, 2016), as well as Curating in Feminist Thought (2016), a special issue of the journal OnCurating edited together with Lara Perry and Dorothee Richter.
Selected essays include: “The Unfinished Feminist Revolution. Performing the Crisis of Reproduction”, “Monumental Activism: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art Making” and “Hysteria Activism: Feminist Collectives for the Twenty-First Century” (all forthcoming), “Curating without Borders: Transnational Feminist and Queer Feminist Practices for the 21st Century”, “Divided We Share: On the Ethics and Politics of Public Space” and “Claims for the Future: Indigenous Rights, Housing Rights, Land Rights, Women’s Rights” (all 2019), as well as “Citizenship and the Museum: On Feminist Acts”, “The Salon Model: The Conversational Complex” and “Caring Activism” (all 2017).

Curating Mourning: Memory, Grief and Feminist Reparative Resistance
Who is mourned and who is not? What is deliberately forgotten, strategically ignored, and silenced in public rituals of mourning as they perform grief and memory? How does the patriarchal colonial gaze result in public memory practices in which the theatre of violence is reproduced and perpetuated? In what ways do memory cultures and rituals of public mourning, including public art, performances, sculptures or museum exhibitions, reproduce axes of inequalities as they continue to adopt the always/already gendered, sexualised, ethnicised and racialised viewpoints connected to the colonial patriarchal gaze? How are artistic and curatorial practices enmeshed in exploiting the pain of others?
Today, feminist art and curating is not only challenged with confronting the traumatic legacies of colonial patriarchy and genocidal terror, but also has to fight back new/old ways of violent misogyny, prevailing racism and white supremacy connected to the current rise of the extreme right, with its culture of toxic masculinity and widespread ideology of hate. Conceiving of feminist politics and feminist ethics in practicing mourning through art making and curating therefore looks to contemporary strategies in feminist, anti-racist and anti-fascist activism, and to the work of scholars such as Athena Athanasiou, Saidiya Hartman, Marianne Hirsch, Gloria Wekker or Françoise Vergès. By introducing feminist and artistic curatorial practices from a wide range of different geographies, this talk focuses on reparative and healing forms of mourning violent histories, including the traumas of slavery, genocidal terror, sexual war crimes and femicide.

Sanja Iveković was born in Zagreb, Croatia, where she currently lives and works. She was raised in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and belongs to the artistic generation covered by the umbrella term “New Art Practice”, which emerged after 1968. Iveković continuously contested the role of art in society through a wide range of media, at the points of intersection between gender, nation and class. Her work from the 1990s deals with the collapse of socialist regimes and the consequences of the triumph of capitalism and the market economy over living conditions, particularly of women. She has participated in many international biennials and major exhibitions, such as 38.EVE International Biennial, Limerick; Kiev Biennial, Kiev (2015); Documenta 8, 11, 12 and 13, 14 (1987, 2002, 2007, 2012, 2016); Artes Mundi, Cardiff (2014), and Istanbul Biennial (2007, 2009). She has had solo exhibitions at DAAD Gallery in Berlin (2015); the South London Gallery/Calvert 22; MUDAM, Luxembourg; MAC/VAL, France, 2012; MoMA, New York (2011), and BAK Utrecht Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2009).

My Double Life as a Feminist Artist
In my short artist’s talk, I will speak about my art practice from my early beginnings in Socialist Yugoslavia until today. Since the 1970s, I have continuously critically reflected on the construction of gender roles under the conditions of alleged socialist equality of women and examined gendered media space, as well as institutional frameworks within the field of culture. Double Life, the title of one of my early works, stands for the performative aspect of my early practice and refers to the structural relationship between the “public” and the “private” sphere and the gender-specific body politics involved in this. I have examined reactionary nationalist contamination of the public sphere in the new state of Croatia by critically examining collective amnesia about the anti-fascist past, which I addressed both as an artist and activist. In the 1990s, I worked with organisations fighting violence against women propelled by the new nation state’s conservatism and patriarchy and developed projects addressing the newly emerging forms of predatory capitalism and its consequences.

Xabier Arakistain is a SHE art curator who has been including the category of sex as a curatorial criterion ever since his first exhibition, Trans Sexual Express. He has curated retrospectives dedicated to key artists of Feminist Art such as Margaret Harrison, Judy Chicago or Guerrilla Girls and also group exhibitions such as The Furious Gaze, Kick in the Eye, Eight Feminist Strategies to Interrupt the Male Gaze or Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, 86 Steps in 45 Years of Art and Feminism. In 2008, concerned as SHE was about the barriers to transmitting feminist knowledge, he jointly launched with the anthropologist Lourdes Méndez the annual interdisciplinary, international and intergenerational course Feminist Perspectives in Artistic Productions and Theories of Art. Between 2007 and 2011, he managed the Montehermoso Cultural Centre with a pioneering project in developing and implementing gender equality policies in the fields of contemporary art, thought and culture.

Lourdes Méndez holds a Chair in the Anthropology of Art at the University of the Basque Country and studied anthropology at the University of Paris VIII. After completing her PhD, she became a lecturer in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country, where she was also Vice Dean of Doctoral Studies and Research (1987-1989) and Vice Dean of International Relations (2004-2009).

Her lines of research encompass analysing the field of visual arts from the perspective of materialistic feminism, the problems arising from designing and applying cultural policies at a local and EU level and the consequences of institutional policies based on the assumption of the so-called “gender perspective” on feminist research. She has written many books and articles and some of the most recent of these include Galicia en Europa. El lugar de las artes plásticas en la política cultural de la Xunta [Galicia in Europe: The Place of Plastics Arts in the Xunta’s Cultural Policy] (2002), “Una connivencia implícita: perspectiva de género, empoderamiento y feminismo institucional” (2005),  Antropología feminista [Feminist Anthropology] (2007), Antropología del campo artístico: Del arte primitivo al contemporáneo [Anthropology of the Artistic Field: From Primitive Art to Contemporary Art] (2009), “Ellos, ‘artistas’ a secas; Ellas, ‘mujeres artistas’; que no es lo mismo” (2012), “Feminismos en movimiento en el Estado español. ¿Re-ampliando el espacio de lo politico?” (2014) and “From the Trap of Difference to that of Excellence: Women Artists, their Works and the Artistic Field (2014), “Exclusionary Genealogies” (2016), “Mujeres, LGTBI, Queers y + : sujetos políticos emergentes y ontología naturalista” (2017), “Una posición de dentro, pero fuera: las artistas y sus obras en el campo del arte” (2018) and Siete claves para una introducción a la antropología [Seven Keys to an Introduction to Anthropology] (2019).