GUERILLA GIRLS: Back to Nature?

Throughout the period of the exhibition Nature \ nature (Duration June 8 to  July 27, 2019), we devoted ourselves to the following topics in two workshops together with the art and cultural mediator Lisa Ribar:

(1) The often overlooked heroines of technology history and
(2) The question of what the exploitation of nature has to do with the marginalization of women.

Workshop 1: Why is the history of technology a story that is mainly told by men and involving men? Based on Sydney Padua’s comic about computer pioneer Ada Lovelace, we found a playful approach to issues of exclusion and talk about the ENIAC-Girls, the programmers of the first electronic universal computing machine of the war years in the U.S.Together, we created a memorial for women in the history of technology, who were previously ignored by historiography.

Workshop 2: In the second part of the workshop offer, we browsed through the images of nature and work out an ecofeminist perspective: Why is it that nature is notsimply malleable by human hands? What does this have to do with women and their life plans? Based on a video clip of the prototype of the "Crazy Cat Lady", Eleanor Abernathy from the Simpsons, we discussed why the cohabitation of women and animals will be stigmatized.

Lisa Ribar, born 1990, studied art history and history at the University of Vienna. Her focus lies within the topics of economic and social history in the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as socio-political problems in architecture and performance art. She works as a freelance art and cultural mediator.

GUERILLA GIRLS. Girls Workshops in Kunstraum Niederoesterreich

Already in the 1980’s, the artist group Guerilla Girls asked the question "Do women have to be naked in the museum?" Named after the feminist pioneers who have been surveying representation in the field of art for thirty years, Kunstraum Niederoesterreich's GUERILLA GIRLS Workshop series provides a selective offer for girls in order to discuss issues such as emancipation and self-determination with young women.

The girls-workshop series GUERILLA GIRLS 2019 was being held in Vienna in cooperation with the Hil Foundation (Mädchenbeirat) and the MA 57  – Frauen in Wien (Promotion and Co-ordination of Women’s Issues).

Lena Lieselotte Schuster, lena.schuster@kunstraum.net , T +43 1 90 42 111-193, +43 664 60 499-193