Visting the Guerilla Girls...

A lot of our thoughts-conversations seem to revolve around gender debates and questions of femininity.

Shine recently highlighted that while many aspects of traditional masculinity have been brought into question and radically displaced as societies move toward an overt display of gender parity - remasculinization is becoming a cultural reality within the subcontinent and beyond. One wonders, whether this phenomenon could be linked with the accentuation in social insecurity, mass violence and fundamentalism.

Kriti is attempting to deal with gender issues through her work, especially looking into questions of home and world - exploring social divides that limit opportunities and create boundaries for women in civic participation. She is also hoping to survey the manner in which women personalize their living spaces and interact with one another within more private settings. These questions co-relate with her earlier work based on the incorporation of traditional community-based processes in contemporary, urban constructions.

While discussing Feminism and art activism, the name 'Guerilla Girls' is bound to come up sooner or later. As soon as it did, I realized that I did not know enough about their work as I had only heard/read glossy, over-stated comments/writings on their intervention based practice.

On reading further I found that while gender and racial equality form the core mission of this anonymous activist group, their public actions not only strive to generate visibility for women artists of colour but expand to exposing the discriminatory practices in art institutions across the world. The collective uses social irony, humour and innovative fact-finding to reveal the extent to which artists of colour are overlooked and underrepresented in large museum collections and at times even in Art fairs as well as Biennales. While they may be criticized for their participation in seminars at the very museums they protest against, it is significant that even at these platforms they maintain a critical stance and continue to use inventive diagnostic tactics.

Guerilla Girls on YouTube