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

Revision as of 16:18, 9 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.

Background

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.

Since 2005, the festival also hosts a web platform COWeb - City of Women Goes Web!, intended to ad-hoc publications of critical writing in relation to the festival's events and to art in general.

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 festival also presented two own productions of emerging Slovenian artists, namely, Nataša Živkovič’s theatre performance First Love's Second Chance (Getting Over Heintje), investigating the relationship between mother and daughter, and Katjuša Kovačič’s dance performance Seeking Balance.

External links

@@ Line 55: / Line 55: @@
 * [[City of Women Association for Promotion of Women in Culture]]
-==External link==
+==External links==
 * [http://www.cityofwomen.org/ City of Women website]
 * [http://www.cityofwomengoesweb.org/2009/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1 COWeb - City of Women Goes Web!]

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

Revision as of 16:18, 9 January 2010

Contents

Background

2009 Programme

See also

External links

Operated by

Financed by