Hysterical Mining

In any society, one fundamental field in which gender is expressed is technology. Technical skills and domains of expertise appear to be divided between the sexes, shaping masculinities and femininities.

In the contemporary West, which pioneered industrialization, allowing it to dominate the worldwide production of material and intellectual goods, of commodities, services, and desires, technology is firmly coded as male. Men are viewed as having a natural affinity with technology, whereas women supposedly fear or dislike it. Men actively engage with machines, making and using them. Women, too, may rely on machines but are effectively regarded as passive beneficiaries of the inventive flame. The modernist association of technology with masculinity translates into gender-specific everyday experiences, historical narratives, employment practices, education, the design of new technologies and the distribution of power across a global society that sees technology as the driving force of progress.

The exhibition analyses the material worlds we are creating through technology and technology’s role in shaping local and global configurations of power, forms of identity, and ways of living. It draws on radical feminist and techno-feminist theories from the 1970s until now that criticised and revised the nexus tying new technologies and technoscience to patriarchal ideas. The exhibition’s agenda is both intellectual and political. The works of the artists included in the show go beyond critique to think and enact other kinds of knowledge, skills, and bodily practices regarding the use as well as production of (new) technologies.

Artists: Trisha Baga, Louise Drulhe, Veronika Eberhart, Sylvia Eckermann & Gerald Nestler, Judith Fegerl, Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni, Katrin Hornek, Barbara Kapusta, Marlene Maier, Miao Ying, Pratchaya Phinthong, Marlies Pöschl, Delphine Reist, Tabita Rezaire

Curators: Anne Faucheret, Vanessa Joan Müller