Michaela Melián

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Michaela Melián: Sarah Schumann und Silvia Bovenschen, 2012 (Installation, detail) Foto: Susi Bodmer

Michaela Melián (born in 1956, lives near Munich) is artist and musician and has repeatedly concerned herself with forgotten female figures from the history of medicine, industry, or art. In her installational stagings, she creates highly aesthetic spaces of tension and multilayered systems of reference by way of drawing and sculpture, film and sound. As a musician she has released two albums and is cofounder of the band F.S.K. (founded in 1980)
 

Sarah Schumann und Silvia Bovenschen

3-Channel Video-Installation, 2012

The Berlin exhibition Künstlerinnen international 1877–1977, which was held in 1977 and showed works by 265 artists, was the first art exhibition in Europe with exclusively female participation. Central to Michaela Melián’s new work Sarah Schumann und Silvia Bovenschen  is a lengthy interview with two of the co-initiators of the exhibition: the artist Sarah Schumann and writer Silvia Bovenschen, who met at the time. In its spatial staging, the combined audio-video installation seems like a visit to the home of the couple Schumann/Bovenschen: captured in a tableau vivant, we see the two sitting beneath a  painting made by Schumann in 1977 depicting Bovenschen. A second film shows a hand leafing through the catalogue of the exhibition from 1977. Now and again, as if we were walking through the Berlin pre-war apartment of the two, we see paintings by Sarah Schumann. The voices of the two tell of challenges and obstacles they experienced: it is a visit with a generation of activists from German women’s movement from the 1960s and 1970s which decisively shaped feminist discourse. And it is a visit with two artists who with their texts and images promote a public shift of perception. As an artist, like many of her contemporaries, Sarah Schumann never received much recognition for their work. Her collages were, even for the women’s movement, too provocative in their affirmation of female eroticism and beauty. In their refusal to conform, Bovenschen and Schumann attest to the multivocality of feminism. Using the example of the now forgotten exhibition Künstlerinnen international 1877–1977, Silvia Bovenschen puts it this way: ‘An exhibition creates a communicative space that takes up a tradition and passes it on. But what did not happen is . . . Somehow just a short while after the exhibition nobody was talking about the show anymore, even the women themselves. It’s almost spooky. And that seems to confirm the history of the lack of a woman’s history. It’s like a hiccup.’ (Silvia Bovenschen and Sarah Schumann, in the interview with Michaela Melian, 2012)

In her artistic research, Michaela Melián undertakes once again a journey to the recent history of the twentieth century and illuminates the forgotten and marginalized, the brief memory of our generation of those who have gained from the past and how this memory produces simplifications and gaps.