A talk on women artists of the Leningrad underground art scene and female voices in contemporary art.
Half a century has passed since Linda Nochlin published her essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? , which became a landmark in the discussion of the place and the significance of women in art. In Russia, the development of women’s art has had its own pace and specificity. Nevertheless, in the 1980s and 1990s, the St. Petersburg art scene produced its first responses to the question of women’s involvement in contemporary art. In 1989, Olesya Turkina curated the exhibition Woman in Art at the Regional Exhibition Hall in Liteiny Prospekt, and in 1994, Irina Aktuganova, Alla Mitrofanova, Olga Suslova, Elena Ivanova, and Olga Levina initiated the creation of Cyber-Femin-Club at Pushkinskaya-10, which radically transformed the face of the St. Petersburg art scene. A host of new female associations emerged in St. Petersburg in those years, including Zhensky Klub (Anna Lepik, Eva Rukhina, Svetlana Kostitskaya, Tatiana Drozdova), Ya lyublyu tebya, zhizn (Manya Alekseeva, Zhenya Kamenetskaya, Marina Teplova, Marina Koldobskaya), and the best-known one, Factory of Found Clothes (Natalya Pershina-Yakimankaya (Glyuklya) and Olga Yegorova (Tsaplya)).