Swiss artist Franziska Greber’s Women’s Art lets us focusing on women and speak out for women’s rights. We are looking forward to seeing everybody!@CWFF 15th June 2017 at 7pm, Crossroads Center (No. 18 Dashiqiao Hutong, Jiu Gulou Daije, Xichen District, Beijing, China). Swiss artist Franziska Greber presents an exchange between artists and public interest organizations in the field of women rights. The rope bindings will be cut and the shirts distributed, with participants urged to “follow the line of women’s rights” and help to write down those women’s words. Come, be a part of this international art project.
„The artist is the acute antenna of the age. Chinese Artist and Curator Li Xinmo, as well as German Artist and Artistic Director Roland von der Emden have planned the international art invitational exhibition entitled “Map and Territory” at Beijing Geely University. The two curators have invited artists from different countries with multiple identities, nationalities and cultural backgrounds to discuss this issue. Their works cover installation, photography, imaging, painting and theater art, which reveals that curators try to step across the “a spiritual map that is difficult to cross” by means of art and through art.
The exhibition locates in the library of Beijing Geely University. Entering the library building, a tall and open spiral structure stands impressively in the middle of the hall. This is the installation work “Personal Territory” by Swiss Artist Franziska Greber. The audience can walk into the installation. In the process of walking into the installation, the audience can see the questions written on the wall of the installation body sequentially: what is the content of my personal territory? What do I wish to add? What do I fear of losing? The deeper you go, the darker the light gets, the lower the question displays on the wall, which is a metaphor for going inward to the heart. Through the question of personal territory, it leads to thinking about the desire and fear deep in the heart, and the fear is often hidden in the deepest place – the deeper the more human. The carpets under the spiral extending out of the spiral with the chairs surrounding outside, hint the connection within and outside of one’s territory and the communication with others. By means of self-questioning psychological analysis, the author explores the boundary of personal territory and its internal causes, as well as the possibility of communication between personal territory and others. The Artist touches on an essential problem of personal territory: fear of strangers is often one of the deep reasons for setting up personal barriers toward outside world. Fear seeks safety, builds barriers, resists change, thus, life repeats itself monotonously. Fear any unpredictable, incapable new life. Fear presses us inside our boundaries, whether there is happiness or sadness, it is a safe place to be, because it has been experienced by us, and it makes us blind to the reality we face. Hold on to the “safe” past in your territory to avoid the approaching of the present, and delay the passage of time. However, tomorrow will come and will correct what we have seen. Therefore, it is not desire, but courage, that allows us to face the things that are strange and surprise us, and to bear our existence more broadly. Desire is an exclusive egocentric feeling to possess something else for its own purpose, which just reduces the diversity of existence.“
“…. The installation ‘VOICES’ by the Swiss artist Franziska Greber is very attractive to the public. In the video we can see the backs of women who never show their faces and we can also see calm talking faces that are not hiding. Their nationalities are different, but their identity is the same: women. What are they talking about? About their experiences, their pain, their hopes and their wishes. On the bench in front of the monitor is a book which contains the voices of the women in written form. These voices form an international art project ‘WOMEN IN THE DARK’ – does it not remind us of Hannah Arendt’s book ‘Men in Dark Times’? …” Liang Ly | May 14, 2019
INITIATOR & CURATOR Li Dan | Director | Beijing | China
The Baturu Cultural Festival Beijing units with the China Women’s Film Festival in Hong Kong to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women and adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995)
Speaking often conflicts with various interests. What women express, when, and why depends on many factors, including country, culture, and context. Values serve as an important reference, as does a sense of safety. The line between voices that resonate and make an impact—and those that fall silent again—is very thin.
BOOKS | 2019 The two books gather all the texts from the video VOICES, bringing together the perspectives of women from Switzerland, India, and Zimbabwe.
2018-2023 Li Xinmo Artist | curator | art teacher | art critic Geely University & Art Space | Beijing
2016-2018 Li Dan Director Crossroads Centre (NGO seeks to raise awareness about women’s and LGBTQ+ rights in China through the use of film and art) | Chairman Women Film Festival China, Hongkong and Beijing | Beijing
To remember is a painful thing. But then again, I can’t help but remember the past. It looms like a huge shadow over me, and I can’t escape the memories of those past events I can’t bear to think upon; they crop up in my dreams sometimes. My name is Meizi. I was born in Heilongjiang District, in the northern part of China. My father was an alcoholic, and I often witnessed him returning home inebriated and beating my mother. She couldn’t take it, and left home, but was found and led back by my father, who then beat her even harder for leaving. My younger brother dropped out of school because of it. My whole life was a nightmare. A few years later, father passed away, and only then did we live in peace. At university I had a boyfriend who was also a male chauvinist, and didn’t let me draw, even decided when I would return home, what kind of friends I was allowed to make, forbade me from talking to other men. It was excruciating, so in the end I still left him, and threw myself into my studies Now I live in Beijing, teaching at a university. Thinking back, I can hardly believe the past.
If I there is another life over, I don’t want to be human. The biggest hope is to leave soon.
My name is Wang Shufan I live in Heilongjiang province Yilan district I married at 18 my husband was two years older than me. Soon after we married he began drinking, for the kids I always endured it. I really wanted to kill him. Then he died himself. Then I found another man and live ‘til now. Now I’m old, and my kids are grown.
I came to Zhuhai after graduation to work as a teacher and met and married my husband through a friend. After marriage, we had a child. Not long after his birth, I found that my husband had an affair and he started coming home less and less frequently, and refuses to talk to me. I’m very sad and I want to divorce him, but when I look at my newborn son I don’t want him to be without a father from such a young age, so I’ve endured it until now.
My dream was to live a normal life, and to marry and have a kid with a responsible husband, living out peaceful days. I married at 24, my husband is a civil servant. We had two kids and the days just went by, one by one, but our marital relationship grew colder and colder. Now it’s been 12 years like this. He’s just like a block of wood, life goes on each day but it’s as if I’m dead and he just gets more and more annoyed with me. Once I always thought it was because of me, that the fault lay with me. Then I discovered his extramarital affairs with countless other women. Half my life is gone and instead I find myself living a lie.
I met my boyfriend at university. He also wanted to go to grad school, so I became a private tutor to support him, and he got into a grad school at a university in Beijing, and I came to find him, but then he already had a new girlfriend. She and I have been pregnanted by him twice, but got an abortion both times because he said it wasn’t the time, that he and I still had school, but my body has suffered greatly. Ever since, I’ve always been depressed, and stopped believing in love, so then I became a prostitute.
Since ancient times, China has been advocating Confucian culture and “the father to son and husband to wife”. Parents beat children, men beat women justly. Until now, there are still many Chinese people with this concept. When I was 11 years old, I witnessed my father beat my mother. Since then, my mother often hid me from my father. When I was 17, my mother became schizophrenic. When I was 23, she ran away from home without a message to us. Only when I was 32, she was found and she was wandering outside. She disappeared for a full nine years, but when she came back, I did not want to see her, perhaps because of fear. She was still in my mind as a violent mother, perverted mother. Maybe because of sadness, I did not want to see her poor look. I think my energy was taken away by her. I received a variety of art treatments until I was 34 before I met a psychotherapist that I would trust. I made my story a short film called “Lost” ……
