The Transient Life of the Supernova – FEM FEST ’22 VIRTUAL EXPO

FEM FEST invites you to The Transient Life of the Supernova, our second virtual exhibition hosted in an exciting new environment built for the occasion. The online expo will be available during the whole duration of the Feminist Festival (4 – 8 March). Join us for a festive online opening on the 4th of March at 19:30. The future doesn’t always seem bright, but our resilience will prevail! ONLINE PORTAL will be launched at 19:00 on Friday. Enter the X-TOPIAN FEM FEST Universe HERE.

The Transient Life of the Supernova
And so we live in uncertain times

It is uncertain
whether you or your loved ones are going to be healthy;
corona variants hit yet again.

It is uncertain
whether you’re going to have a job, food on your table, or a roof above your head;
capitalism is collapsing by giving birth to worse power dynamics.

It is uncertain
whether your children will get a proper education or any education at all;
education is undermined and crooked.

It is uncertain
whether you’re going to make it home safe, unharmed,
whether you’re going to wake up in your bed or wake up at all;
more women have been raped, harassed or experienced domestic violence within the last 2 years than in the past 30.
Fascism, hatred, mistreatment, violence is everywhere.

It is uncertain whether you’ll have the strength to move on, to fight for your rights, to scream your truth. Who is going to believe you? Who is going to support you?

Maybe this life is just a dystopian tale; it is uncertain.

Artworks & Creators:

  1. An Affirmation by Ada M. Patterson
  2. Arctium by Lisa Vander Plaetse & Monika Vineyard
  3. A Chosen Family Business by Ali Lucchinelli, Mijntje Van der Linden, Anouk Genrich
  4. Dream Away by Kirsten van Werven
  5. ENCLOSURES by Cy X 
  6. In Pursuit of Black Noise by Cy X 
  7. Go Back to the Kitchen by Hannah Sterke
  8. Watch Me When I Rise by Danii Walton
  9. Queer Mercury by Erik Peters

Curated by Nikki Georgiou of KONTRA 
Digital Enviroment by
Noemi Biro 

MORE ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Ada M. Patterson is an artist and writer based between Barbados and Rotterdam. She works with masquerade, performance, poetry, textiles and video, looking at the ways storytelling can limit, enable and complicate identity formation. Her recent work considers grief, elegy writing and archiving as tools for disrupting the disappearance of communities queered by crisis.

Hannah Sterke is a conceptual creative and art director. She gets inspired by internet culture and intersectionality.

Online gaming is a world filled with toxicity, especially towards women. In the form of sexual harassment, gender roles, and insults they are made to feel unwelcome in an environment that was designed to cater to the male gaze. 

‘Go Back to the Kitchen’ is a two-part project that tackles sexism in video games. Part one is a documentary containing a collection of interviews with (professional) gamers, to provide insight into experiences of harassment that is encountered online. Part two is a toolset for female gamers to fight that harassment and reclaim the power from their oppressors, this is achieved through a series of weapons based on the common insults ‘go back to the kitchen and ‘make me a sandwich’.

 

Kirsten van Werven is a 2D artist and writer, focussed on telling stories of personal investment and small experiences through short stories, illustrations as well as board- and videogame design.
Dream away is a magical realism visual novel inspired by contemporary coming-of-age narratives in young-adult fiction.The game puts the player in the shoes of Eleanor, an introverted girl who processes her own existence and the world through a lens of fantasy and dreams.

 

Lisa Vander Plaetse is a Rotterdam based product designer, with a focus on footwear. The shoes she creates are artefacts that tell stories of the human body, technology, culture and self-identity. As a queer femme coming from a lineage of immigration, her design process is an opportunity to conduct sociological research around the theme of identities and shape new stories through the medium of footwear and collaborative work.

Monika Vineyard is a visual and performance artist. Her foundation as a filmmaker has given her the tools to translate her ideologies to linear storytelling by deconstructing our idea of reality with staged documentaries, interactive video installations and video performances. In her work, she investigates topics such as gender identity, sexuality and self-perception.

“I, Danii Walton identify as transfemme, I’m from Cape Town, South Africa, born and bred. My work is a constant exploration of the transfemme experience, its complexities, and its elements of fabulosity, decadence and pain. As an audio-visual maker, I dismantle and deconstruct the cisgender-heterosexual patriarchal cistem, through my imagery and the force I create with the work. My mediums in use are photography, painting, performance, video and sound design.

The visuals function as a tool to reshape iconography and power figures,  and illuminate the supreme and gorgeous body of transness, as well as divining a more accurate and diverse representation of our experience.”

“I am Ali, a photographer and together with Anouk, a filmmaker and Mijntje, a curator, we started the project ‘A Chosen Family Business.’ It began as a search to fill the holes in our Queer history to feel whole. By archiving Queer history and our Community, we are able to show: We see you. We exist and we’ve existed for a long time. It is a way for us to build, celebrate and care for our community. Welcome to our Chosen Family.”

Ali is a freelance photographer, working and living in Rotterdam.
Mijntje is an Art History master student and curator for KLAUW collective.
Anouk is a freelance filmmaker, currently graduating at the Willem de Kooning Academy.

 

 

CY X (they/we) is a black queer non-binary storyteller, pleasure ceremonialist, and cyber witch merging sound, video art, installation, and performance. Their practice is grounded in the art of synthesis: truth generation and sound generation which is used to create portals that may aid us in exploring black queer futures and abolitionist possibilities. Fusing art and technology with the practice of witchcraft, they use spells, rituals, and alchemic practices as modes of activation.

 The stories we tell influence the possible futures that lie ahead of us. Erik Peters explores these stories and relationships within a dynamic web of interdependencies between humans, nature, and technology. His research-based practice revolves around designing multidisciplinary and interactive scenarios through collaborative worldbuilding and speculative storytelling.

Queer Mercury is a visual exploration into the possible utopian impulse embedded in queer collectivity. Queer futurity, as explained by José Esteban Muñoz, is essentially about the rejection of the ‘here and now’ and an insistence on potentiality for another world. More important than defining an end goal is striving for, and moving towards, more inclusive worlds.

 

FIND FULL FEM FEST PROGRAMME HERE