Birgit Jürgenssen
in ‘Women House’, Monnaie de Paris
20 October 2017 – 28 January 2018
‘Women House’, 2017, exhibition view, Monnaie de Paris, 2017. Courtesy: © Monnaie de Paris
‘Women House’, 2017, exhibition view, Monnaie de Paris, 2017. Courtesy: © Monnaie de Paris
‘Women House’, 2017, exhibition view, Monnaie de Paris, 2017. Courtesy: © Monnaie de Paris
Women House is the meeting of two notions: a gender - the female - and a space - the domestic one. Architecture and public space have been masculine while the domestic space was for a long time the prison or the shelter of women: this historical evidence is nevertheless not a fatality and the exhibition Women House shows this. On a 1000 Sq m. floor area and in some of Monnaie de Paris’ courtyards, it brings together 39 female artists of the 20th and 21st centuries who take up this complex subject and place women at the center of a history of which they were absent. After its Parisian stage, Women House will exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C. on March 8, 2018.
The challenge of finding a work space at home was theorized by Virginia Woolf in 1929, as she encouraged women, in her essay “A Room of One’s Own”, to find a room that they could “lock up without disturbance”. This is the point of departure of Women House, whose ambition continues thematically, up to recent works produced by a young generation of women artists, passing by the 70s, when their counterparts equally rebelled against the deprivation of physical space -for exhibition or work-, as they did against the lack of the symbolic space - of recognition.