CTRL+ALT+DEL She Said.
Magdalena Kallenberger deals with feminist manifestos from recent decades and the demands contained therein during different eras, which are continually formulated anew – most of them unfulfilled and buried in archives, which themselves seem to have fallen prey to ravages of time. It literally goes up the walls: because most of the current demands against inequality, racism, classism, sexism, and heteronormativity have long been raised in different eras and contexts by myriad courageous forerunners.
Why is there hardly any connection to past experiences, demands, and struggles? Kallenberger’s examination of the demands of the women’s movements of the last 150 years forms the foundation of her appropriately named photo-text installation Crawling (Up) the Walls.
She connects personal experiences and observations with collected everyday commentary from women in a text collage. The three staged photographs show the artist “going up the walls” – in the face of a series of objects like sausages, cucumbers, and eggs, which as satirizing sexualized placeholders reference the artist’s rage about ongoing patriarchal structures and the resulting social injustices. Moreover, in their extreme staging of poses, objects, and attributions of meaning, the photocompositions become monuments themselves and simultaneously, with their staged poses, a satire of traditional personified monuments.
// Dr. Katharina Koch, alpha nova galerie futura.
We Who Are Many (2019)
mixed-media installation
How do we – women who are artists who are mothers who are daughters who are artists – write ourselves into the (art) world? And, how do we unwrite an already written page? How do we draw from our experiences as splitted subjectivities an intergenerational dialogue with our feminist ancestors?
In the process of setting up the mixed-media installation Magdalena Kallenberger „crawls up the walls“ again, paving the way to unite voices and demands from various eras and struggles against inequality, racism, classism, sexism, and heteronormativity. The fragmentary, expansive wall installation is scattered cumulatively over the whole gallery space. The typographically accentuated text plates give voice to a canonical babble of voices which are throwing their vivid shades onto the walls. Colorful poster figures in different sizes are crawling up the walls, drawing their individual empowerment from these powerful acts of speech. The colorful duplexity of the monumental posture hereby unfolds its double meaning as an inclined figure paying tribute by bowing down to these glittering allies of historical ancestors. The installation borrows its title from Adrienne Rich (Adrienne Rich, “Notes Towards a Politics of Location”, in Blood, Bread, and Poetry (New York: WW, Norton,1986), (225)).
Feminist Manifestos and other Essays
Maya Deren, „A Statement of Principle“ (1961), Rivolta Femminile, „On Woman’s Absence from Celebratory Manifestations of Male Creativity“ (1971), Agnes Denes, „A Manifesto“ (1969), Grupo Vertebra, „The Vertebra Manifesto“ (1970), Audre Lorde, „Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Rede ning Difference“ (1980), James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time,” (1963), James Baldwin, “Nothing Personal”, (1963), Valie Export, „Women’s Art: A Manifesto“ (1972), Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki, „Manifesto for a Radical Femininity for an Other Cinema“ (1977), Valerie Jaudon and Joyce Kozloff. Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture (1978), Melissa Meyer and Miriam Shapiro, „Waste Not Want Not: An Inquiry into what Women Saved and Assembled, Femmage“ (1978), Ding Fang, „Red Brigade Precept“ (1987), Anita Dube, „Questions and Dialogue“ (1987)
Crawling (Up) the Walls / Die Wände hochgehen (2019), image-text installation. Exhibition View. ´Ctrl+Alt+Del´ She Said. alpha nova galerie futura, March/April 2019.