Regards de Femmes

“Women’s Perspectives” provides an opportunity to see the female artists in the collection of Astrid Ullens de Schooten Whettnall in a different light. Passionately involved in her Foundation, created in a working-class district of Brussels, the Belgian collector devotes all her energy to promoting and helping artists of all genres. For the tenth anniversary of the Foundation A, the idea of highlighting the female artists in the collection was obvious to Astrid Ullens de Schooten Whettnall. A curator presents the artists collected by a woman. It is a shared history intended to be open to all, extended to artists with transversal practices using the medium for a specific project. The nineteenth women chosen all have a commitment to their community in common with a desire to denounce, break the codes and push back the boundaries on the issues of social justice, femininity and the environment. The perspective is also global, including Latin American artists such as Yolanda Andrade, Luz María Bedoya, Kattia García Fayat and Graciela Iturbide and historical figures such as Diane Arbus, Helen Levitt and Lisette Model. The German school, included in the collection, reveals series by Andrea Geyer and Ursula Schulz Dornburg, as well as works by the couple Gabriele and Helmut Nothhelfer, exhibited for the first time, and colour prints by the Italian Francesca Gardini. The project that brings together the works of Canadian Moyra Davey, Americans Zoe Leonard and Martha Rosler, South African Jo Ractliffe and American-Peruvian Tarrah Krajnak aims to broaden the focus on the historical contexts that have surrounded, promoted or limited the recognition of women artists. Finally, the work of the great American portrait artist Judith Joy Ross, exhibited at the opening of the Foundation ten years ago, illustrates the photographer's commitment to activists and young people who are failing at school. Each in their own way, these determined, pioneering and unique artists express a form of resistance to norms, be they social, gendered or political. They remind us that we live in a contemporary space that bears the indelible and ephemeral traces of its history, which we must continue to observe with care.

Béatrice Andrieux, curator of the exhibition.

Avec les oeuvres de: Adriana Lestido, Andrea Geyer, Diane Arbus, Francesca Gardini, Gabriele und Helmut Nothhelfer, Graciela Iturbide, Helen Levitt, Jo Ractliffe, Judith Joy Ross, Kattia García Fayat, Lisette Model, Luz María Bedoya, Martha Rosler, Moyra Davey, Paz Errázuriz, Tarrah Krajnak, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Yolanda Andrade, Zoe Leonard.

The A Foundation A publish the catalogue of the exhibition Regards de Femmes.