Opening: Thu, 07.06.2018

Duration: Fri, 08 06 – Sat, 28.07.2018

Curated by: Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein

In 1976 Martha Wilson founded the seminal art space Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. in New York, which has served as an internationally unique showcase for artist’s books and a site for performative art production since this time. Its archive counts amongst the most important reference points for performance history. 

Martha Wilson’s political engagement as an artist is expressed in a series of satirical performances, photo series, and films. The satirical format of these (staged) solo performances enabled Wilson to employ a wide array of presentation forms, including vocals, recitation, and her all-girl art punk band DISBAND.

The exhibition The Two Halves of Martha Wilson’s Brain frames the productivity of her subversive, consequent approach and the reciprocities between her own artistic work and her collaborations as well as support for other female artists. With Franklin Furnace as a platform, this bred a viable network for feminist, societal, and aesthetic issues over the course of the past four decades. The exhibition juxtaposes select documents from the archive with a representative cross-section of the artist’s oeuvre and can certainly be read as a sublime cartography of the history of feminist performance art.