Entre ses mains - Donna Gottschalk, Liz Magor

“(…) feminism has given me permission to be unsure, as well as digressive, unapologetic, and unauthoritative. It has helped me valorize detail, entertain the small stories and eschew the need to be at the front, or on top of, an art movement.” Liz Magor in “a conversation with Liz Magor”, Subject to Change , Concordia University Press, 2023 “(...) there can be no possible innocence when one is a young girl, because being a young girl means being addressed; because being a young girl means that everything we do always signifies something that exceeds us, and that there will always be someone to misinterpret it; it means not being able to exist for oneself (...)” Louise Chennevière, Pour Britney, POL editions, 2024 IA: What would an artistic practice look like that was formed in a feminist context but whose subject is not feminism? One that would have the female condition as the circumstance of its emergence rather than as its object? What brings together, for me, these two great figures of contemporary art—Liz Magor and Donna Gottschalk—despite their use of such different means (one working primarily with volume, the other with photography), is the possibility offered to them by the feminism of the late 1960s—the feminism of their twenties—“to be digressive, unapologetic, and unauthoritative.” This is a working line both for the exhibition Entre ses mains [In Her Hands] and for the gallery. To begin from a detail, from a given situation outside the overarching grand narratives of history; to welcome the stories of those who once were young girls being addressed; to dismantle, piece by piece and collectively, the sticky and alienating clichés of becoming-female (wardrobe, gestures, poses) in order to throw them into the fire. There is a rage and a force in Liz’s and Donna’s works—in the raised index fingers, the clenched fists as well as the caressing gestures—that address us directly, without discourse, without any need for contextualization. The context we already know: it is the irony of our lives and the depth of our friendships. CB: Donna Gottschalk’s photographs and Liz Magor’s sculptures are true visual manifestos on affective responsibility. Both propose a counter-society grounded in affect: for Donna Gottschalk, beginning from excluded bodies; for Liz Magor, from our responsibility as human beings to exercise a force that goes hand in hand with empathy. Donna uses her camera as one opens one’s arms to others, creating a space of fusion, solidarity, and collective support. The embrace becomes a structure of survival: heads touch, arms encircle and gently close. There is no asymmetry—only a shared space where bodies support one another in the face of social exclusion. Is unconditional affection possible? With her recent sculptures cast in polymerised gypsum, Liz shows just how a gesture is never neutral: to touch is to influence. There may be a shift in intensity between the artist’s contracted hands and the soft plush forms that absorb the pressure without responding. This emotional displacement contrasts with the need for tenderness and repair circulating between Donna and those whom she recognizes, listens to, and protects. Whether through the circulation of affect or the concentration of energy, both artists explore politics of touch that can only be permeable. Some of Donna’s photographs recount, across several prints, the restlessness of an embrace, while Liz proposes the silent affirmation of an inner transmutation through a symbolic constraint placed on a vulnerable body. Fortunately, as Liz suggests, we can still wear perfect clothes fresh out of the box, snapping in the wind against our perfect bodies. Donna Gottschalk is an American photographer and a lesbian activist born in 1949. She grew up in New York City, in the Lower East Side. She joined the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1969. The same year she joined the Gay Liberation Front, becoming an active member of the movement. In 1970, she and other activists organized the Lavender Menace action during the National Organisation for Women congress, to protest against the exclusion of lesbians from the women’s liberation movement. In 1971, she moved to San Francisco with her sisters Myla and Mary where she worked as a taxi driver. She then joined a photographic printing company before moving to Connecticut where she established her own lab with a partner. In the late 1990s, she became a nursing auxiliary and moved to Vermont. Throughout her life, Donna Gottschalk kept photographing her loved ones, her siblings, butch, fem, trans, gay activists, comrades, and friends. The Leslie Lohman Museum in New York hosted her first retrospective in 2018. Since then, her work has been the subject of solo and group show at Marcelle Alix Gallery, Paris (2019, 2023), at CRAC Alsace, Altkirch (2024), at CREDAC, Ivry-sur-Seine (2024), at Bozar, Brussels (2024), at LE BAL, Paris and at The photographers' gallery until 07.06.26. Liz Magor was born in 1948. She lives in Vancouver (Canada). An important artist of the Canadian scene, she participated to a number of group shows at the Vancouver Art Gallery, National Art Gallery in Ottawa, Seattle Art Museum, Wattis Institute, to Documenta 8 and to the Venice Biennale. Triangle Marseille reintroduced her work in Europe in 2013 (cur. Céline Kopp) and it was subsequently shown at Crédac-contemporary art center in Ivry-sur-Seine (cur. Claire Le Restif). In 2017, her retrospective which was initiated by Musée d'Art Contemporain in Montreal toured at Migros Museum Zurich, Kunstverein in Hamburg and MAMAC in Nice. She was a resident at DAAD in Berlin in 2017-2018. Her work was presented at The Renaissance Society, Chicago and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge in 2019 and was the subject of solo shows at Focal Point Gallery (Southend-on-Sea, UK), The Douglas Hyde Gallery (Dublin, IR) and Fondazione Giuliani (Rome, IT) in 2023 and at the MoCA Toronto in 2024. Warmest thanks to: Hélène Giannecchini, Claire Kellenberger, Evie K Horton, Laure Leprince, Joshua Duncan, Anne Lacoste, Le Bal Paris (Diane Dufour, Julie Héraut and the team, The Photographers' Gallery London (José Neves), Fondation Pernod-Ricard (Franck Balland)