I have started a new instagram account called girls_lottawzt https://www.instagram.com/girls_lottawzt/ where I will be showing my work regarding the project Girls that I am currently working on. The project is very important to me and I will explain why. Please join me!
Women’s rights and equality are under attack. It is an unpleasant time where rape is broadcasted live on facebook and where a couple of new laws regarding women’s independence, health and prosperity has been instituted just the last couple of months around the world. I feel sad and scared by this development, although I also see a strength and great resistance among many people. Many of us will do what we can to work against this trend and I will definitely do what I can to contribute. My way is to paint.
I have for some time been working with girls, painting them, drawing them and also modelling them in clay. I started a couple of years ago with my exhibition Beyond the male gaze in Lidköping city art gallery but I have continued long after that and now that Trump was elected president, I began intensively again.
It can be an act of power just to take the right to look and to see as a woman, when that was previously a right reserved the man. This is what we call the manly gaze as normative and I have been working with that issue before but this is not only that. This is also and most of all wanting to show all the women affected by the current madness going on.
My mission is to continue working portraying and represent all women who should be able to live their lives the way they want and be independent and secure.
To try to stop the attack on women’s rights I want everyone to see the ones affected by it. I want people to see that this new development reagards all women, your friends, sisters, mothers, daughters, basically every girl and woman you see around you, like the one on the bus, in the grocery store, the woman who works in the library, who performs surgery on you, the one singing in a band, she who has 14 friends, four children, in short everyone.
It is they, we, who are affected by what is happening right now. I want to show everyone, us. And I will do it as long as I feel it is needed. Four years on, if that will be necessary.
Here is some new work from this week.
This week I will take down the exhibition I have had in Lund in the South of Sweden, called Freedom. It had been great not at least because of the fact that some young people have used the exhibition to talk around the subject freedom and to perhaps find new ways or interpretations of it. I feel very proud to be part of that.
I have also this week been to a seminar about art politics. I haven’t really been to concerned around that subject I must admit. But I learned a lot. Not at least that I am not alone thinking about these things. For example this thing about being an artist and not really part of the social security system. Also the subject of funding and how that works and who has the power in who gets what is of course really interesting. They talked about class and the fact that many artist comes from a middle or upper middle class background. is that ideal? Not really. A lot of other important and basic questions were raised in the seminar. What is culture and what is art for example? What is the difference between the two? What kind of society do we want? I think I can see a new way coming, and an old style or way of handling stuff maybe coming to an end. And I think it is a good thing. But we need to talk about these things. We need to keep what is working here in Sweden and find out new ways for our new time. We have to ask ourselves what do we want? How should artist be payed or what role should they have in society? I will think more about this and come back to it. What I will carry with me for now is the word ”tuggmotstånd”. Someone with quite a lot of power in the funding department said that what art is about. I will keep thinking abut that.
Lotta Wästerlid Zmuda-Trzebiatowski 