New Exhibition 2024
BODY of OPPORTUNITY
To be opened by Annika Kristensen,
Perth Festival 2024 Visual Arts Curator.
Artist’s Chronicle Nov/Dec 2023
GALLERY CENTRAL, PERTH
Opening and Performance: Wednesday 24th January 6-8.30pm.
Second performance and public forum Saturday 10th February 12-4pm
To 16th February 2024.
12 Aberdeen St, Perth, WA
ARTSHUB 2024 Review 5th March 2024
Artists showing women’s bodies as (still) a battleground
Body of Opportunity opening address by Annika Kristensen, Perth Festival 2024 Visual Arts Curator
“One of the enormous pleasures of my job as a curator is spending time in artist’s studios. Much has been said about their being akin to a factory or laboratory – a place of experimentation and production. I like to think of them as the invisible root system that holds up the singular tree – with the tree being the resolved artwork, and the roots a tangled web of otherwise invisible influences, branching thoughts and artistic nourishment. In the case of many female artists, in particular, the studio is also the place where art meets life: a kitchen table, perhaps, upon which the art sits – a work in progress – inseparable from the dross of the everyday.”One of the enormous pleasures of my job as a curator is spending time in artist’s studios. Much has been said about their being akin to a factory or laboratory – a place of experimentation and production. I like to think of them as the invisible root system that holds up the singular tree – with the tree being the resolved artwork, and the roots a tangled web of otherwise invisible influences, branching thoughts and artistic nourishment. In the case of many female artists, in particular, the studio is also the place where art meets life: a kitchen table, perhaps, upon which the art sits – a work in progress – inseparable from the dross of the everyday.
Tania’s studio is out the back of her house in South Fremantle. “Don’t mind the dogs” she warned me in advance of my visits – who could be heard, barking from the main house, their excited greetings marking the transition from the reality of the street to the wonder contained within the portal of her studio at the rear. Tania’s studio is a mix of all three of these analogies: the factory/laboratory, the root system, the kitchen table – but it is also like a set: a stage primed for something to happen. On my first visit, drapes painted in the style of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon hang like backdrops on the studio walls; Dana Stoll – a collaborator and costume creative for this series – is there wearing one of her creations. When I return, close towards the end of Tania’s production, the studio walls are returned to white – and the space is minimal bar for two formally-placed manikins; one wearing a cloak of watchful eyes, and the other a tutu and a corset, similarly painted to echo Picasso’s contorted female forms.
We sat at the table in the studio’s kitchenette where Tania talked me through a slideshow of images that would eventually come to form the content of this exhibition. Here is Dana again, in the same kitchen, returning the camera’s hard stare. In other images, various props and sets appear – including a backdrop repurposed from collages cut from now outdated calendars featuring Tania’s work. Within these sets – each constructed in the clean studio in which I was sitting – a group of female collaborators perform for the camera in various states of dress and undress. They appear – returning the gaze in many images, obscuring their faces in others, and – for others still – ignoring the watchful eye of the camera entirely, just clearly delighting in the safety and company of one another. When Tania closed the laptop, the studio felt empty and quiet, bereft of the energy that had previously taken place within it. It struck me that whatever else Tania’s studio might be, it is also a sanctuary – a space in which her collaborators feel at ease to explore and take risks, but critically, also to play.
In a year of exhibitions challenging the dominance of Picasso within the western art canon, Tania’s reference to his 1907 painting feels timely. Named for ‘The Avignon’, a street in Barcelona famed for its brothels, Picasso’s subjects are five prostitutes, abstracted into angular, geometric forms, with some wearing African masks. It is a visual metaphor that serves as natural background for Tania’s interrogation of Freud’s Madonna/whore complex – a theory of a complex that is said to develop in men who see women as either saintly Madonna’s or debased whores. Tania’s interest in this subject is long-standing and well-known: in the late 1980s, while living in New York, Tania witnessed the sexual assault of a striptease artist while working in the same bar. In protest, Tania conceived of her legendary ‘Angry Underwear’: a series of wearable art pieces, designed especially for sex workers, including the iconic shark bra, which was later worn by the real-life Madonna.
Discussing this series at Fremantle Arts Centre as part of her exhibition Pop Porn in 2022, Tania was approached after her artist talk by Gabriela – a woman working in the Adult Entertainment Industry, who extended an invitation to Tania to visit her strip club. The ensuing conversation about women’s’ body autonomy and agency, updated to the reflect perspectives of women working in the industry today, instigated this new exhibition Body of Opportunity, which was created in the same spirit of open conversation and collaboration originally offered by Gabriela. In this new work, in place of anger, I see humour; a kind of punk irreverence. I see a group of confident, liberated women, gloriously in charge of their own bodies: self-determined, self-assured, and self-aware.
As I go to leave the studio I take a final photograph of an open page in Tania’s notebook. In thick black marker pen it reads: “We just want to show ourselves in our own bodies without fear, or shame, or stigma”. Congratulations Tania, and to all of your collaborators, for achieving just that.”
2023
2022
2018: Western Australian Art Gallery purchases “Angry Underwear” installation for state collection and the “Know my Name” Survey of Australian Women Artists at National Gallery of Australia.
2021
2021: Tania Ferrier on The Art Show – ABC Radio National
2019
“We are pleased to inform you that your script Family Lore has been selected for the second round of consideration for the 2020 Development Track”
“We are pleased to inform you that your script ANGRY UNDERWEAR has been selected for the second round of consideration for the 2019 January Screenwriters Lab.”
SCULPTURE BY THE SEA 2019:
“Congratulations Tania Ferrier & Abe Dunovits, your work ‘Family Tree’ has been selected by the Curatorial Panel to be exhibited in Sculpture by the Sea, Cottesloe 2019. The exhibition dates are from 1 – 18 March 2019.”
IWD 2019: “EMBEDDED” @ NOIR DARKROOM. Tania Ferrier, Pam Kleemann, Annie Jeppe, Emma “Ruby” Armstrong-Porter, Michele Elliot, Olga Cironis & Nikita Dunovits-Ferrier.
RECENT WRITE-UPS:
“The Artist and her work”.
Cruther’s Collection, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, UWA 2019.
2018
Sotheby’s Institute of Art, NYC,USA, 2018.
“Who says women are all alike” video animation by Tania Ferrier & Negin Sharifzadeh
Finalist in the ROI ART PRIZE 2018, Melbourne, Victoria.
SALAMANCA ANGRY UNDERWEAR 2018
2017
FEMMES FOLLES, USA 2016
Retrospective of original Angry Underwear exhibition at Artemis in 1989.
