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Creating spaces for female voices in the art world
The First Supper Symposium (FSS) is a collaborative art project focusing on art activism, feminism and political issues. Current members Gidsken Braadlie, Lisa Pacini and Camilla Dahl are collaborating with Hanan Benammar, Ksenia Aksenova and Ragnhild Tronstad on the Prologue Symposia.
FSS launched in 2012 in order to celebrate the one-hundred-year anniversary for women's right to vote in Norway the year after, by organizing a three-day symposium in Oslo. The main theme for the event was gender equality. Where do female artists stand in the art world 100 years after the introduction of women's suffrage? To what extent are women underrepresented compared to men in public and private collections, art history and the commercial market? Why don't female philanthropists collect art made by women to the same degree as art made by men?
The main purpose for the symposium is to make room for female artists in the art world.
The parole is: Equal space, equal rights.
The First symposium (25—27 May, 2013) invited the feminist icon and a world-renowned artist Judy Chicago, a noted art historian and Deputy Director at the Getty Institute Andrew Perchuk together with Dr. Elizabeth Sackler, founder of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, to Oslo to talk about gender issues in art.
The Second symposium (12 May, 2014) was held at Chateau Neuf, The Norwegian Students' Society headquarters in Oslo. A conversation between Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti and Pussy Riot represented by Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina was the high point of the evening. Moderated by Natalie Hope O'Donnell, the following speakers held the stage: curator Ekaterina Sharova, curator Viktor Misiano, philosophers Rosi Braidotti and Judith Butler. (Production manager of the event was Hanne Skogvang.)