City of Women International Festival of Contemporary Arts

The 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 annually in Ljubljana over a period of 10 days in October, the festival presents some 40 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 17th edition of the festival in October 2011 is called Abrakadabra featuring the secrecy, illusions, rites and pure imagination that actually reflect the social, political and individual transformations.

Mesto žensk, promocijski material by Tadej Kreft on YouTube

Programme and locations

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 others presented the 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 its 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: the 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, the singer Diamanda Galás, and the Sol Picó Dance Company respectively, as well as Xiao Lu, considered the first-ever Chinese woman performer, 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 was intended to reflect the audience members' own inner feelings in a piece entitled No Title. Ko Siulan presented her long duration travelling performance Poetest, an action, taking place on the street, bordering on protest and propaganda. The Guatemalan Regina Jóse Galindo 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 theoretical part of the programme included a lecture on Pina Bausch by the theoretician and dramaturge Katja Praznik and a lecture on feminist performance art by the theoretician and writer Jennie Klein.

The festival also presented two of its own productions by 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.

COWeb

Since 2005, the festival also maintains a web platform COWeb - City of Women Goes Web!, intended to be an ad-hoc publication of critical writing in relation to the festival's events and to art in general. Each year a number of establishing critics join the team and covers the events.

External links

Gallery

Drage drage (Expensive Darlings), choreographed by Maja Delak, premiering at Dance Theatre Ljubljana co-produced by Emanat Institute and City of Women International Festival of Contemporary Arts, 2007.

Drage drage [Expensive darlings], choreographed by Maja Delak, premiering at Dance Theatre Ljubljana during City of Women International Festival of Contemporary Arts, 2007

My Body, My Territory, a street performance by the ACT Women group at the October special festival edition Red Dawn above the City of Women in 2013

Ana Čigon's performance Thank you, dear Ladies at the October special festival edition Red Dawn above the City of Women in 2013

City of Women International Festival of Contemporary Arts

Contents

Programme and locations

2009 programme

COWeb

See also

External links

Gallery

Operated by

Financed by