When the woman speaks… Pioneers of performance

Martha Rosler, Esther Ferrer, Joan Jonas and María Teresa Hincapié explored and pioneered performance and action art from their different cultural backgrounds. In the 1970s, some, like Rosler, promoted a feminist action art based on women’s everyday lives and public spaces. ‘When the woman speaks, she names her own oppression’, she often said. Others, like Esther Ferrer, who began her long career in the late sixties, engaged in performative practices that required the viewers’ participation and a zero-degree of fiction indebted to the theatre of Bertold Brecht. Also at that time, Joan Jonas was experimenting with symbolic elements such as the mask and the mirror, in a language close to Minimalism. In the eighties, and in a Latin-American context, María Teresa Hincapié became interested in long-duration performances, taking on board their forcefulness and difficulties. A constellation of names and physical proposals that you are invited to discover through the artists in the Collection.