RE-DIRECTING: EAST. Conversations # 12:
Liza Babenko, Ukraine
Artistic and curatorial work of the Moscow Feminist Group (MFG)

October 2, 2013 at 6 p.m., Laboratory Building CCA
The presentations are held in English.


Artistic and curatorial work of the Moscow Feminist Group (MFG)
Liza Babenko will present artistic, curatorial, and activist work of the feminist group that she is member of. She will go through the current main radical feminist practices in Russia, explaining the main issues of radical feminist art and feminist politics in that country today. The discursive and visual presentation will cover the exhibitions Feminist Pencil (Red October gallery's hostel, Moscow, 2013) and International Woman's Day (Worker and Collective Farm exhibition hall, Moscow, 2013). As case studies, these events will also help us understand the curatorial policy of MFG which opposes patriarchal, sexist, ageist, classist and other discriminative attitudes existing on the post-soviet territories. MFG focuses on general patriarchal social regime in Russia as well as on the critique of the field of professional which which they consider to be patriarchal too. Babenko will also present new generation of feminist video artists, graphic artists and curators, including Marina Vinnik, Umnaya Masha, Mikaela, Victoriya Lomasko and Nadia Plungian. Last but not least, Babenko will propose to discuss the activities of some famous post-Soviet groups who call themselves ''feminist'' (i.e.: Femen, Ukraine and Pussy Riot, Russia) and see the principal differences between their and MFG’s art work strategies.

Liza Babenko (b. 1988) is a writer, curator and director, who received her MA in Philosophical Anthropology and Philosophy of Culture from the Russian Anthropological School at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow and graduated from Victor Misiano’s Moscow Curatorial Summer School "Doing Exhibitions Politically". Babenko was an activist of the Visual Culture Research Centre, Kiev. Currently she is an activist of the Feminist Ofenziva group (Kiev), as well as the Moscow Feminist Group (Moscow). Babenko contributes to the "Art Ukraine" and other magazines. Her latest research and staged work, in collaboration with Anton Vidokle, is the play titled "The Energy of Cosmos Is Indestructible". She lives and works in Kiev.