Across an installation of six films, Alex Martinis Roe’s To Become Two traces the stories of six different, yet connected, feminist groups from the 1970s to the present who have built communities in Europe and Australia. These include: The Milan Women's Bookstore co-operative; Psychanalyse et Politique, Paris; Women's Studies at the University of Utrecht; a network in Sydney including people involved in the Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative, Feminist Film Workers, and the Department of General Philosophy at Sydney University; and Duoda - Centro de investigación de Mujeres and Ca La Dona in Barcelona.
Working across film, lecture-performance and installation, Martinis Roe’s work uses archival materials to open up space for reflection and conversation. Creating evolving modes of storytelling, her film installations expand into dialogue-based events led by the artist with the goal of engaging workshop participants in addressing the question: How can different generations of women from different backgrounds learn, share and relate to one another within feminist discourse and practice today? Martinis Roe’s work proposes answers to this question through narrating fragments of stories from the 70’s to today about the feminist groups she spent time with, and by forming new narratives by coming together and enacting and generating new propositions for feminist collective practice.
Martinis Roe’s project at Kunstverein Badischer includes a workshop and public salon event, which will engage contributors from Karlsruhe in a digestion of the historical feminist practices narrated in the To Become Two exhibition. Contributors will undertake a series of exercises led by Martinis Roe, that expand on proposals generated by her film project Our Future Network to develop further propositions for feminist political practices in dialogue with participants’ own knowledge, needs, competences, desires and contexts. More specifically, these new propositions will attempt to foster political alliances, facilitating collaboration among distinct political engagements that nevertheless have compatible objectives.
To Become Two at Badischer Kunstverein is curated by Anja Casser and Didem Yazici. The project’s exhibition design is by Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga and poster series design by Chiara Figone. Further information about the project at Badischer Kunstverein can be found here.
Alex Martinis Roe’s To Become Two was co-commissioned by ar/ge kunst (Bolzano); Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory, (Utrecht); If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (Amsterdam) and The Showroom (London). The project was produced with the support of the Graduiertenschule der Universität der Künste Berlin and the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, and its arts funding and advisory body.