The Hidden Museum II. Your country is tomorrow, for the last 1000 years
The exhibition of the same name, accompanied by a two-part catalogue, took place in the winter of 1987/88 as part of Berlin’s 750 years celebrations at the Akademie der Künste. The title refers to the invisibility of women artists, its subtitle taken from a poem by Ingeborg Bachmann. As the working group write in their foreword: “This captures the essence of women’s experience of life: bearing within oneself a sense of one’s own importance and the knowledge that it has never waned, but that so far it has barely been allowed to show itself in reality.” During its research, the group found that at the Nationalgalerie, there was not a single woman in the contemporary art since 1945 category. In the exhibition Kunst in der Bundesrepublik 1945–1985, only ten of the 218 featured artists were women. The working group countered this “neglect and exclusion of art by women” with its own choice of artists: Magdalena Abakanowicz, Victoria Bell, Gisela Breitling, Helen Frankenthaler, Evelyn Kuwertz, Maria Lassnig, Marianne Pohl, Margaret Raspé, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Susanne Wehland, and Irmgart Wessel-Zumloh. The catalogue also contains portraits of the artists by photographer Birgit Kleber.

Ed.: nGbK

Work group: Gisela Breitling, Renate Flagmeier, Susanne Gerber, Margret Holz, Evelyn Kuwertz, Eike Messer, Julia von Randow, Ingrid Wagner-Kantuser

With contributions by: Stefanie Endlich, Aulikki Eromäki, Renate Herter, Birgit Kleber, Ingrid Wagner-Kantuser