Group exhibition, Monterrey, Mexico, 2013
Pristine Gallery is pleased to announce the international group exhibition, YOUR BODY IS A BATTLEGROUND. The exhibition dovetails on the original source of its title, which is the iconic work by the artist Barbara Kruger. Her silk-screened, photographic vinyl print consists of a black and white frontal image of a woman whose left half of her face is in negative format. Superimposed on the surface from top to bottom is the text YOUR BODY IS A BATTLEGROUND. While rich with metaphor and open-ended in meaning, the juxtaposition of image and the pronoun your alludes to the undermining of women’s rights since Kruger’s piece was designed for the 1989 Women’s March on Washington, D.C.
The exhibition focuses on questions of the body but from a more expansive purview as well as the audience that Kruger’s image addresses. For the body that constitutes the image as well as whom it is directed are not only gendered but also inscribed with class, race, nationality, and sexual orientation. The exhibition comes at a time when “non-normative” forms of agency are expanding the identity rubric to accommodate a protean subjectivity that is mutable and fluid, while the erosion of women’s rights by the political right and myriad religious orthodoxies continues unabated. Although the individual works are thematically independent and diverse in narrative, YOUR BODY IS A BATTLEGROUND is a topical exhibition consisting of painting, sculpture, work-on-paper, graphic art, photography, video, and site-specific installation.
With Ama Birch, Oreet Ashery, Jaishri Abichandani, Chiara Coccorese, Celia Eslamieh Shomal, Simone de Beauvoir, Despo Magoni, Claudia Doring Baez, Siri Devi Khandavilli, Andrea Frank, Dahlia Elsayed, Jeanette Doyle and Paula Elion.
Curator: Raul Zamudio