The exhibition "Embodied Logos" featuring 14 German women artists, will open on April 18th, and it will provide the opportunity for a series of events organised around the theme of women in society and in the arts. The associated seminars, performances and exhibitions are being organised in co-operation with a wide variety of institutions, in Budapest, including Goethe-Institut Budapest, the Museum of Contemporary Arts/Ludwig Museum Budapest, the Program Gender and Culture at the Central European University, and Collegium Budapest, in addition to a number of galleries around Hungary.
In this series, the changing discourse surrounding women artists, representations of women in art and the changing circumstances of women in contemporary society will be examined.
Exhibitions, films, literature, concerts, and conferences, entitled "Women in Arts and Society'', will deal with contemporary aspects of the gender, Its tradition in Eastern and Western societies, and will present internationally and nationally renowned artists and their works as well as theoreticians and their thoughts to a general and an expert Hungarian audience. Internationally and nationally known artists and critics will present their works and their ideas in a form that will appeal to both generalists and specialists alike.
"Embodied Logos", an exhibition of the Stuttgart Institute for Foreign Relations, presents works of art created by 14 German women artists of three generations, including Rebecca Horn, Katharina Fritsch, Rosemarie Trockel, and Isa Genzken, to name only a few. The starting point for the exhibition is the artist, not gender as a substantive theme, so that women artists were selected regardless of the topics on which they have worked. Even so, the important subject of the „feminine character of art” (Lyotard) is provocatively raised by an exhibition that presents only women artists. And the works selected for display place the body, a thoroughly gendered topic, at the very centre of attention.
This exhibition will be held in association with other exhibitions around Budapest and around Hungary presenting Hungarian, Croatian, German, Japanese and American women artists. It will also be accompanied by a three-part conference on the social, cultural and aesthetic aspects of gender as they appear in both the arts and society.
Participants in these conferences are philosophers, sociologists, art historians, artists and curators from Hungary as well as from other East-Central European countries, Germany and America. The aim of the conference is to open a dialogue about the changing circumstances of women, particularly in East-Central Europe, but also in Western Europe and North America, and about the ways in which the changing circumstances of women are represented in contemporary arts. The more theoretical seminars will be complemented by performances, readings, exhibitions, concerts and other more directly artistic expressions.
Some of the events are timed to coincide with the opening of "Embodied Logos" while others will be held in conjunction with the International Book Festival Budapest 1997. In addition, a series of international films will be shown in conjunction with a conference on Women in Film to close this series of events.
