Opening: Friday 13 June from 7pm
Exhibition: 14 June through 20 July, 2025
Discussion event: Sunday, 15 June, 4 p.m.
after the butcher, exhibition space for contemporary art and social issues, is pleased to present Lena Rosa Händle and Victoria Lomasko, two artists whose work is dedicated to societal issues such as social equality and justice from a feminist-emancipatory perspective.
In her project Linked Arms and Striding with Joyful Strength, Lena Rosa Händle shows photographic portraits of feminist groups from the 1980s in East and West Berlin. She combines these with texts by the women portrayed. Händle embarks on a search for traces with her protagonists in order to artistically capture their actions and group images in re-stagings and thus make them tangible in a new way.
Often invisible lesbian, queer and feminist stories take centre stage – as do women from older generations who have often been socially and politically active for decades and are still active in various feminist contexts today.
The exploration encompasses the question of how we relate to each other, how we establish and live relationships, both with each other and between the artist, her ‘eye’, the camera and her protagonists. Creating and depicting relationships by means of two classic photographic subjects: the group portrait and the (extended) family portrait. The feminists are not ‘only’ given a face in the process of being photographed – the portrait also creates a space in which the people portrayed speak with their voice: through their texts, which could become part of the work.
Victoria Lomasko is showing a cycle of her new reportage drawings, created in public space, of daily encounters and experiences in the ‘Western’ society and its people that is new to her.
Lomasko is a Russian artist working with social and political issues at the intersection of art, journalism, and sociology, using a synthesis of text and images. Her three graphic books Forbidden Art, Other Russias and The Last Soviet Artist, published in several languages including German, are a chronicle of two decades of Russia’s transformation from a liberal though capitalistic country into a totalitarian state. With a liner and sketchbook, she followed and recorded numerous protest demonstrations on Moscow’s streets, as well as political court cases, such as the one against members of the feminist and activist artist group Pussy Riot in Moscow in 2012.
Since 2022 Lomasko lives in exile mainly in Berlin, where she continues to research contemporary life and different local communities of our society. She uses her pencils to register, observe and report on social contradictions and injustice as a kind of seismographic recorder. With both her pen and her sketchbook she is an active member in the public sphere, e.g. at documenta fifteen and other exhibitions, rallies and demonstrations, both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian, queer-feminist parades, Women’s Day on March 8, and Labour Day on May 1, among others. “I want to analyse and document the contemporary ‘western’ life and society from my post-Soviet perspective”, Lomasko said.
Note:
Discussion event Linked Arms and Striding with Joyful Strength
with Lena Rosa Händle, Roswitha Baumeister and Sarah Happersberger (moderation)
Sunday 15 June 2025 4 pm
How and under what conditions did feminist groups form in East and West Berlin in the 1980s? What images are conveyed by them – now and then? In a discussion moderated by Sarah Happersberger, the work of Lena Rosa Händle will be used to address questions of lesbian and feminist visibility, self-image, alliance politics, group images, memory culture and intergenerationality.