Binita Walia & Emilia Telese

EXHIBITION - 6th February - 7th March, 2015

Modern Women was a new artist-led, artist-curated exhibition featuring the work of Binita Walia and Emilia Telese, exploring some of the challenges and issues faced by women from different cultural backgrounds in Asia and the Mediterranean, such as stereotypes, rigid gender roles, inequality, feminicide as well as the implications of cultural migration and multiculturalism in society.

Works featured made use of site-specific installation, performance, photography, jewellery, video and textile media to create iconic, strong images that aim to provoke and challenge the viewer.

The exhibition also joins philosophical points of contact between Telese's and Walia's diverse body of work, both employing elements of real life and cultural background references, to create powerful messages around current social and political issues as well as creating a new collaboration between the two artists and Airspace Gallery, with a planned series of successful debates and events.

Emilia Telese explores the boundary between personal history and universal condition. Her work features elements of autobiography combined with conscious engagement, political and social debate, and the questioning and deconstruction of behaviour. In her work, she makes use of performance, installation, interactive technology, film, literature, and public art. Her works for 'Modern Women' continue her line of research examining the image of women in the media, beauty stereotypes and the distorted image of self. They include Femminicidio, a site-specific installation on domestic violence, Elizabeth, a series of billboards with performative elements combining iconic Hollywood imagery with gender stereotypes in the South of Italy, and Everyday Icons, a series of large-scale photographs exploring classic Italian Renaissance icon motifs in everyday, contemporary settings.

Binita Walia's work features pieces from her installation series The Modern Woman, exploring cultural rebelliousness, gender heritage and women's sense of duty, making use of video, textiles and everyday objects. This exhibition will include Too Busy, an installation using a heirloom sari and gold as a symbol of cultural heritage, Secret Ingredients, a series of sculptural cooking vessels and gold leaf exploring the emotional value of food, Forewarned is forearmed?, a video piece illustrating a bride shopping for a wedding sari and Always and Forever, a jewellery piece making use of gold to elevate the mundanity of everyday chores.

The exhibition utilised AirSpace Gallery's double window space as a billboard, showing the exhibition title MODERN WOMEN with each artist impersonating a film poster of their opposite cultures: Binita Walia as the heroine of an Italian movie, and Emilia Telese as that of an Asian movie.

Modern Women was funded by Arts Council England's Grants for the Arts programme.