Female Gaze (2022)

Online Exhibition for the substation singapore

What defines the Female Gaze? This online exhibition documents and explores the initial conversation and exchange between Indonesian artist and dramaturg, Agnes Christina, and Singaporean artist, curator, and designer Lizzie Wee. In bringing together 12 works each from Agnes’ Women of Java and Lizzie’s Unlit Matches, both coincidentally works on fabric, along with one new work from each artist, this showcase aims to shift perspectives on what it means to be a woman in the contemporary art world. With their vastly diverse interests and talents, Lizzie and Agnes engage in conversations surrounding the experience of being multi-hyphenates exploring parallel themes which run through both women’s individual practices, like ‘living’ on the internet but constantly moving house, exploring the societal roles and expectations of the Southeast Asian woman, and working with identity, traditions, and texts.

Agnes’ Women of Java is a series of works depicting 35 different types of women described in the Primbon Jawa, a text popular in Java for its practical and mystical advice and fortune-telling, not unlike Feng Shui. Lizzie’s Unlit Matches is a series of fabric works using responsive texts to her experiences with online dating. In using humour and their perspectives on the absurdities of two social traditions and institutions still utilised today, the Primbon Jawa and Online Dating, Agnes and Lizzie contemplate what the female gaze holds, questions, and how it shifts. Rather than solely focusing on judging and thus subverting the male gaze, the artists invite you to an intimate discussion of how to be critical and thoughtful of traditions of our heritage that we still uphold today and institutions of the present that may still reflect the past, without dismissing them entirely. The female gaze might simply be about looking indirectly by subtly exerting the soft power we have been socialised to wield.