An Evening With Artists

The film program, conceived as a companion to the exhibition The Woman Question 1550–2025, draws upon a centuries-old lineage of women gathering in rooms apart: from the bluestockings debating in drawing rooms; through clandestine study circles that defied authority and union halls where grievances were spoken into collective force; to ballroom competitions, where self-fashioning became survival, and feminist film collectives shining light at the politics of the personal. These assemblies, often precarious and fleeting, functioned as what Nancy Fraser has called “subaltern counterpublics” -- spaces of circulation where women rehearsed modes of discourse denied to them in dominant culture.

An Evening With… invokes this legacy by bringing together nine artists who, across generations, were in equal measure celebrated and reviled, magnified and marginalised, remembered and effaced. Their works speak insistently of the body, performance, desire, ancestry, violence, and care. Yoko Ono and Tracey Emin foreground the body as both medium and battleground, transforming vulnerability and confession into acts of radical presence. Niki de Saint Phalle wrangles the law of the father, while Julie Dash aways with the master, reclaiming history and ancestry through texture and ritual. The works of Leonor Fini and Eva Švankmajerová foreground costume and prop to reveal the theatricality of femininity: performance, mask, drag as a necessary disguise within the strictures of patriarchy. Echoing bell hooks’s insistence that creating from the margins creates space for radical possibility, Dana Kavelina, Ayo Akingbade, Barbara Hammer and Małga Kubiak speak in voices that are at once personal and profoundly collective. Their films address the unfinished struggles of our present – from queer visibility and female desire, through race and belonging, to the gendered traumas of war and systemic violence.

To bring these works together is to affirm, as Hannah Arendt observed, that to speak, even in fractured or scandalous registers, is already to act. Films presented in the program do not form a single manifesto. They speak across time and registers, bound by a shared drive of artistic self-expression,  offering fragments of lived resistance, images of care and confrontation, gestures of survival and imagination. They remind us that cinema has always been not only a medium of representation, but a gathering place – a room apart – where “the woman question” is continuously rephrased, refracted, and renewed.

[Aleksandra Jeglińska]