May 12-13, 2023. Tate Modern, London.
Talk delivered at the symposium “New Encounters with Abakanowicz” organized on in conjunction with Tate Modern’s exhibition “Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope” (Nov 2022-May 2023). See the full symposium program here.
ABSTRACT:
“The Impossible Feminism of Magdalena Abakanowicz”
This presentation considers Magdalena Abakanowicz speculatively in the—very implausible—feminist context, positioning her work and her subjectivity in the scopic regime of socialist patriarchy. Abakanowicz would never call herself a feminist. She did not seem to have much sympathy for the feminist cause (even though she met and exhibited with self-proclaimed feminist artists in the 1970) and rarely—if ever—demonstrated the kind of female solidarity that is associated with the movement. And yet, it is hard to deny that the soft and fluid bodies of her signature Abakans were modeled after, and served as metaphors of, the female body. And that she ultimately abandoned them to transition, in the 1970s and 1980s, to more stable and permanent, masculinist figurative sculpture. Art historians who analyzed this oeuvre have pointed either to Abakanowicz’s careerist motivations in pursuing this switch (Jakubowska), or to the misunderstanding she had received from the Polish scene (Markowska). This presentation attempts to view the artist’s reluctance towards feminism, and her abandonment of Abakans through the lens of what Bojana Pejić called the ideology of socialist patriarchy.
Magdalena Moskalewicz 