installation-artists

""Living, Forgiving, Remembering | Museum Arnhem." www.museumarnhem.nl. Retrieved 27 March 2025."

"I enjoyed these encounters. As an artist, one so seldom knows what the reaction of visitors to a gallery really is, or if they understand what one is trying to do."

"Through the themes of the body, sexuality, self-representation, motherhood, beliefs, the exhibition questions how the question of intimacy in black women reveals unspoken words and manifests their relationship to the world. It offers a reflection where the notions of memory, family, spirituality and imagination are intertwined. The creations presented - painting, pottery, photography, video, performance, embroidery etc. - celebrate the emancipatory energy of the "power of their hands"."

"I don’t think so, I think there are really strong individuals and people will be surprised when we show individually. The thing is, they don’t give people a chance. That’s the main problem."

"Well you know, sometimes I get so irritated with audiences, especially male audiences who will say stupid things like “that’s a nice ass” or something like that. For me, I think as long as the performer knows exactly what the intention is with the body everybody will get over everything else. There are some people who just don’t get it, and that’s ok too. I know what my body is loaded with. I know what it is and I know how to use it. I know I’ve gotten to the point where I know how it works. I don’t necessarily care anymore."

"Williamson ran a series of workshops where she explored the power of place and its identity to various citizens. At the end of the workshop, a consensus was reached on how best to exemplify their feelings around that particular place."

"Standing at the window through many different weathers, trying to reconstruct that vanished landscape, many visitors to the gallery came up to me to chat, and recall their memories of District Six, or asked me what exactly I was doing."

"I'm in the world. Artists are in the world . . . My role is to get artists’ work out into the world, and excite people about it [while] being respectful [and] finding artists people won’t be familiar with."

"Throughout her career artist Sue Williamson has asked viewers of her photos, videos, urban graffiti and other pigeonhole-resistant labours to critically think about how and where they live."

"The first performance I did at the Theater Spektakel was basically around reparations, how we take back the land, and I used the student protests as the starting point. I started with video pieces of these different camps for Boere (Afrikaans) guys who run the camp because they think black people are going to invade and kill them all, and then I move on to the student protests, and after that I go to the land matter. It’s also about how the female black body is viewed in protests, how black women have protested certain things, and how they are kept out of protest history. If women must protest they must protest not to make a mark, you know, it’s not like you can be a part of the ANC and be there with Mandela."

"I am trying to reconstruct a vision of District Six as it was in the 1960s,"

"You are born here, and yet you can’t speak one vernacular language is an issue for me. You’ve had the chance, I mean you are surrounded by people, are you telling me that as a white person you are honestly not going to make that effort. I know how to speak English, I wasn’t born around people who speak English, and I was born around people who speak isiXhosa, isiZulu. Yet I know how to speak seSotho, which is totally different from my own language, and you are telling me it’s difficult to speak one. So I’m just not buying it. I’m not interested. I title my work in a language that resonates with the work. It is also to exclude, because I know you can’t speak it, and I know that most of the audience coming in need a translation, which forces you to engage with the work even further. So it’s also a conscious decision – it might be a bad strategy, but at this point in time I don’t really care – I’m going to continue doing it.""

"As far as was possible, I worked from old archival photos of the district, first engraving, then inking up the areas with etching ink, and finally cleaning the ink from the surface, so that only the ink in the lines remained. I used a tin of ink I discovered in my studio, dating from the 80s and made by the incomparable T E Lawrence of London."

"Williamson also writes and lectures about art, and is the author of the classic ‘Resistance Art in South Africa’ (1989). In 2009, she published ‘South African Art Now’ (HarperCollins, New York)."

"Williamson is a social commentator and combines slick aesthetic devices with hard, cutting edge facts of life. This is almost contradictory, yet it is precisely in this tension, that we are both lured into the artwork and then come away thinking about the issues, the image thus returns to text as it were."

"Reconciliation is needed more than ever. We see Black Lives Matter demonstrations throughout the world, calling attention to inequality, racism and senseless violence. Inflammatory language on social media and even in politics serves to increase social polarisation. All too often, the world is shocked by extreme acts of violence prompted by prejudice against those of a certain religion, ethnicity, sexuality or gender identity."

""The simplest thing, I could literally just have an exhibition by putting this bowl down. For me, that would be enough. But for some people they’ve always got to go extra, extra, extra. I don’t feel the same way."

"If these were the works universally exalted across America’s art museums, if these were the images filling the heads of American children over generations, what would America’s conversations about race, gender and sexuality sound like today?"

"Trained as a printmaker, Williamson also works in video, photography and installation. Her work addresses the media, social issues and aspects of contemporary history."

"As much as Pinky Pinky is a perpetrator of violence, it also seems a victim of, and scapegoat for, violent, uncivil actions – a constructed 'something' to blame for social problems."

"The material process of the paintings is a fluid affair; the glue’s capacity to change its form and colour when it comes into contact with other forces – air, gravity, water, my gestures – imbues it with a presence that holds onto itself as ‘something other’, yet can simultaneously take on the guise of an image."

"I believe that encounters with lively matter can chasten my fantasies of human mastery, highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency and reshape the self and its interests"

"From the outset, her attitude to painting has been simultaneously modernist and counter-modernist in its complex irreverence to the purity of both creative act and the physical medium."

""I was always interested in objects as carriers of meanings beyond themselves, they are physical traces of time, of people's lives and social histories, like an archive, which I use similarly to how I use film...its an ephemeral art really. The objects get taken down and become like paint tubes again"."

"With global warming, what do we imagine? Burning? Drowning? Absolute alterity? And what forms – or formlessnesses – do we imagine this through?"

""Penny Siopis is one of the few artists in the world today who can weave a material web of marks, gestures, voices, words, found things and painted surfaces to entangle the brute forces of history with the delicate threads of human vulnerability"."

"Many of these prosthetics are "traditionally" flesh colour, a kind of dirty pink. There is irony here, as flesh colour is not just a category of colour, but nothing less than a western conceit in which whiteness (pink) becomes the universal colour for flesh"

""The constant evolution of the installations and the meanings made from them functions as a generative force in Siopis's work. One thing nestled next to another or dropped over another, creating countless relationships. They're endless these bits of relationships between things and objects and spaces"."

""Sopis's Will is the ultimate time piece...We are able to glance back on a life-in-formation and recognize the subject as discursively produced, 'as project, something to be built"

"Drozdik works primarily in series, which can be developed over decades, complementing or evolving from one another."

"Individual Mythology already displays several characteristics of Drozdik’s way of work."

"She denounces and deconstructs science by showing its role in the creation of gender roles and reveals the construction behind the myth of the female identity and the objectivity of science."

"By overlaying pictures of famous dancers with Drozdik’s own dance moves and projecting images of Hungarian history on her body, she examines herself as an artist, a women and a Hungarian citizen."

"Using her own body for representative methods or simply analyzing herself trough mental work, Drozdik reflects herself in all of her projects."

"Her work can be found in several major collections such as the Museum Moderner Kunst (Vienna) and the Ludwig Museum Budapest."

"Well aware of the irony of her own situation, Orshi Drozdik can’t seem to escape the construction of herself."

"Orsolya Drozdik (artist Orshi Drozdik) is the first feminist artist in Hungary."

"There was no contemporary circle that would support me in these ideas."

"But there was patriarchal communist political propaganda: “equality,” “emancipation of women” that voiced the political and social rights of women."

"Individual Mythology was created in the mid-seventies; the series analyses the representation of the female body in general and the illustration of the artist’s body in particular."

"While consistently applying her perspective as a woman, an increased interest in the scientific representation of the body becomes evident in her work."

"I was a follower of the historical feminist movement in Hungary and of the liberating force of the new dance movement which developed within its artistic context, and which I named “free dance”."

"I was born immediately after WWII, in 1946. I decided to become an artist at the age of 10, after my father’s death."

"It is truly frightening for a young woman artist to separate herself from the patriarchal artistic discourse that she learnt from, that does not support her and that she would like to be part of."

"I rather consider myself as the pursuer of the ideas and artistic movement of Hungarian feminism that started prior to WWI."

"In my analysis of the art discourse emerging from the cross-section revealing the interlacement of patriarchal power and knowledge, I was greatly influenced by Valéria Dienes’s feminist writings, who could reconcile her thoughts on psychology, philosophy, and semiotics with the choreography of the art of movement – i.e., the mind with the body, and knowledge with feelings."

"When I arrived at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 1970, my intention crystallized."

"By holding on to my independence and autonomy, I decided to make art that I felt authentic, art that was based on the recognition that as a woman, as a woman artist, I feel, see, and think differently."

"Despite and along with this, censored feminism and the art of new dance, the movement art that pleaded the “divine” body resonated in me when I contrasted the experiences of my “bodily existence” with traditional and patriarchal representation of the woman’s body."

"I was alone with my intention and could only find precursors in the historical Hungarian feminism that my mother had passed on to me (in the wake of periodicals such as A Nő és a Társadalom [Woman and Society, 1907‒1913] and A Nő [The Woman, 1914‒1917]."