Difference between revisions of "City of Women International Festival of Contemporary Arts"

Revision as of 21:07, 8 January 2010

City of Women International Festival of Contemporary Arts was first organised in 1995 in Ljubljana as an initiative of the Governmental Women's Policy Office (later renamed as the Equal Opportunities Office) in order to draw attention to the relative lack of participation and presentation of women in the arts. Since 1996 it has been organised as an annual International Festival of Contemporary Arts by the City of Women Association for Promotion of Women in Culture.

The festival presents women artists from Slovenia and abroad working in different disciplines and contexts. Held in Ljubljana in October over the period of ten days, the festival presents some forty events, including theatre, visual arts, performance art, dance, film, video, literature, and multimedia, which relate to and discuss the selected theme of each year’s festival. The last edition of the festival revolved around the theme of the Global South.

City of Women celebrates diversity. The festival is a platform for a variety of opinions and perspectives of artists and theoreticians from all around the world. The festival aims to articulate the position of women in contemporary society through marginalised perspectives as well as attempts to bring different political and social emphases to the established conceptions of modernity. Thus, the 2007 edition of the festival, entitled Laugh Out Loud!, among other presented an international curatorial and artistic project Humour Works, which dealt with the positive and negative consequences of precarious working conditions in the context of ‘Eastern’ Europe, while the 2008 edition, titled Raw Symbiosis, focused on the understanding of culture and the legitimation of power relations through discourses about nature, to man’s relation to animals, and to technology as the new nature of man.

Events are held at various sites around town, ranging from established cultural institutions to alternative spaces. Apart from performances and exhibitions, the festival features round-table debates, lectures, and workshops, focusing on themes dealing with key problems of modern women and highlighting other marginalised social phenomena.

During the last years, the festival offers an increasing number of own productions and co-productions, mainly from the field of performing arts and dance.

2009 Programme

The 2009 edition of City of Women festival presented artists from spaces and contexts that can be framed under the notion of the global, economically unprivileged South, which plays an increasing importance in the social, political, and cultural context of the 21st Century, hence the title of the festival – Global South. The presented projects are marked with a critical stance, contemplating the modern mutated vision of society, which abolishes history, differences, identities, and specifics. The festival thus presented some renowned names from the fields of film, music, and dance, such as the video artist Shirin Neshat, Diamanda Galás, and Sol Picó Dance Company respectively, as well as Xiao Lu, considered the first Chinese woman performer ever, who presented the piece What is Love, which questioned the relationship between the artist and the audience. He Chengyao, well known for her subtle and sensitive poetic performances, invited the members of the audience to interact with her in a special arrangement that is intended to reflect their own inner feelings in a piece titled No Title. Ko Siulan presented her long duration traveling performance Poetest, an action, taking place on the street, bordering on protest and propaganda. The Guatemalan Regina Jóse Galindo has created Stretch Marks exclusively for City of Women, in which she tackled the theme of violent reality and the existing power relations in her native country. The festival hosted the sound installation Octophonic Diary by the Lebanese pianist and composer Cynthia Zaven and the multimedia installation/performance Travel in a Box by Lala Raščić, discussing survival strategies of the disadvantaged in view of contemporary migration politics. The programme also offered concerts by the electrotrash/clash pop punk group Chicks on Speed and by Mercedes Peón, who combines Galician ethno music with contemporary expressive gestures, and films by Byambasuren Davaa and Ema Kugler. The theoretic part of the programme included a lecture on Pina Bausch by the theoretician and dramaturge Katja Praznik and the lecture on feminist performance art by the theoretician and writer Jennie Klein.

External link

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-[[City of Women International Festival of Contemporary Arts]] was first organised in [[established::1995]] in Ljubljana as an initiative of the Governmental Women's Policy Office (later renamed as the Equal Opportunities Office), in order to draw attention to the relative lack of participation and presentation of women in the arts. Since 1996 it has been organised as an annual International Festival of Contemporary Arts by the [[City of Women Association for Promotion of Women in Culture]].
+[[City of Women International Festival of Contemporary Arts]] was first organised in [[established::1995]] in Ljubljana as an initiative of the Governmental Women's Policy Office (later renamed as the Equal Opportunities Office) in order to draw attention to the relative lack of participation and presentation of women in the arts. Since 1996 it has been organised as an annual International Festival of Contemporary Arts by the [[City of Women Association for Promotion of Women in Culture]].
-The festival presents women artists from Slovenia and abroad working in different disciplines and contexts. In October over the 10 days of the festival some 40 events are presented, including film, video, theatre, visual arts, performance art, dance, literature and multimedia.
+The festival presents women artists from Slovenia and abroad working in different disciplines and contexts. Held in Ljubljana in October over the period of ten days, the festival presents some forty events, including theatre, visual arts, performance art, dance, film, video, literature, and multimedia, which relate to and discuss the selected theme of each year’s festival. The last edition of the festival revolved around the theme of the Global South.
 }}
-City of Women celebrates diversity. The festival is a platform for a variety of opinions and perspectives of artists and theoreticians from several countries. Events are held at various sites around town. Apart from performances and exhibitions, each festival features round-table debates, lectures and workshops, focusing on themes dealing with key problems of modern women. Some of the themes: ''Lough Out Loud'' (2007), ''Raw Symbiosis'' (2008), ''Global South'' (2009).
+City of Women celebrates diversity. The festival is a platform for a variety of opinions and perspectives of artists and theoreticians from all around the world. The festival aims to articulate the position of women in contemporary society through marginalised perspectives as well as attempts to bring different political and social emphases to the established conceptions of modernity. Thus, the 2007 edition of the festival, entitled ''Laugh Out Loud!'', among other presented an international curatorial and artistic project Humour Works, which dealt with the positive and negative consequences of precarious working conditions in the context of ‘Eastern’ Europe, while the 2008 edition, titled ''Raw Symbiosis'', focused on the understanding of culture and the legitimation of power relations through discourses about nature, to man’s relation to animals, and to technology as the new nature of man.
-==2006 Programme==
+Events are held at various sites around town, ranging from established cultural institutions to alternative spaces. Apart from performances and exhibitions, the festival features round-table debates, lectures, and workshops, focusing on themes dealing with key problems of modern women and highlighting other marginalised social phenomena.
+During the last years, the festival offers an increasing number of own productions and co-productions, mainly from the field of performing arts and dance.
+==2009 Programme==
+The 2009 edition of City of Women festival presented artists from spaces and contexts that can be framed under the notion of the global, economically unprivileged South, which plays an increasing importance in the social, political, and cultural context of the 21st Century, hence the title of the festival – Global South. The presented projects are marked with a critical stance, contemplating the modern mutated vision of society, which abolishes history, differences, identities, and specifics. The festival thus presented some renowned names from the fields of film, music, and dance, such as the video artist Shirin Neshat, Diamanda Galás, and Sol Picó Dance Company respectively, as well as Xiao Lu, considered the first Chinese woman performer ever, who presented the piece ''What is Love'', which questioned the relationship between the artist and the audience. He Chengyao, well known for her subtle and sensitive poetic performances, invited the members of the audience to interact with her in a special arrangement that is intended to reflect their own inner feelings in a piece titled ''No Title''. Ko Siulan presented her long duration traveling performance ''Poetest'', an action, taking place on the street, bordering on protest and propaganda. The Guatemalan Regina Jóse Galindo has created ''Stretch Marks'' exclusively for City of Women, in which she tackled the theme of violent reality and the existing power relations in her native country. The festival hosted the sound installation ''Octophonic Diary'' by the Lebanese pianist and composer Cynthia Zaven and the multimedia installation/performance ''Travel in a Box'' by Lala Raščić, discussing survival strategies of the disadvantaged in view of contemporary migration politics. The programme also offered concerts by the electrotrash/clash pop punk group Chicks on Speed and by Mercedes Peón, who combines Galician ethno music with contemporary expressive gestures, and films by Byambasuren Davaa and Ema Kugler. The theoretic part of the programme included a lecture on Pina Bausch by the theoretician and dramaturge Katja Praznik and the lecture on feminist performance art by the theoretician and writer Jennie Klein.
-The 12th City of Women Festival of 2006 presented artists from 13 countries and focused on the meaning of history and memory. On the 100th anniversary of the birth of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), a special tribute was paid to this German political theorist of Jewish origin whose works the organisers said 'created one of the most influential works of reference on political thinking of the 20th century'. A performance reconstructing a 1972 conference on her work, followed by a debate, was staged at Metelkova. The festival was opened by Germaine Dulac's Smiling Madame Beudet, a silent film screened to live music accompaniment. Joseph Valenčič, who is involved with Slovene-American immigration history and popular culture, gave a lecture on Slovene women in American arts. Some 50 archival photographs from his private collection were put on display under the title We Are Bold American Women. Slovene women and their descendants in the US were also portrayed in the documentary 100% Slovenian by Mirjam M. Hladnik and Hanna A. W. Slak. The festival also featured Life Differently, a documentary by Loredana Bianconi (Italy) which depicts four Moroccan-born Belgian women, and One Point Two by Silvia Ferreri (Italy), which deals with the problem of declining birth rates in contemporary western society. Italian journalist Sabina Guzzanti also showed her ''Viva Zapatero!'', a satire of the Berlusconi government. In 2006 one of the debates, themed ''Gender, Literature and Cultural Memory in the Context of South Eastern Europe'', compared two periods: the era of Yugoslavia, with its common literary market and inter-textual and intercultural links, which were broken as a result of the disintegration of the common state, and the post-conflict literary milieux that exist today in Yugoslavia's successor states. A party dubbed ''Valpurgis Night with City of Women Witches'' closed the 2006 festival at [[Metelkova mesto Autonomous Cultural Zone]].

Difference between revisions of "City of Women International Festival of Contemporary Arts"

Revision as of 21:07, 8 January 2010

2009 Programme

See also

External link

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