Escape from the past

The Prague City Gallery's exhibition venue on the second floor of Old Town Hall, used primarily to showcase rising young Czech artists, is taking a diversion from its usual path with its latest offering, a traveling exhibition by the Spanish artist Ouka Leele.

Born in 1957 in Madrid, Leele represented her country at the 11th Biennial in Cairo in 2008. The selection of 15 works in this exhibition is from the cycle she showed there, titled Transgressive Utopia. It mixes black-and-white and digital color photographs ranging from the mid-1970s to 2007.

What ties this diverse collection of images together is an inquiry into the cultural myths and stereotypes perpetuated by art and contemporary culture. Among the most persuasive works in the show are those in which Leele looks back to the history of art, focusing on female representation in iconic paintings. She brings them to life by imagining a continuation of their story lines, with outcomes decidedly different from what their original male creators would have envisioned.

For example, Leele has invented a new ending for the famous painting Las Meninas (1656) by her compatriot Diego Velázquez. In her 2007 digital photograph Menina liberada? (Leele often uses long, poetic titles for her works, shortened here in the interest of space), one of the maids of honor, the wide skirt of her gown having been transformed into a red metallic cage, is breaking free from its confines as she makes a balletic leap out of the picture into the exhibition room of the Museo del Prado, suddenly arriving in the 21st century.

Another re-envisioning of a canonical art work is the 2007 digital photo My Body Is My Territory?, in which a nude female figure from Peter Paul Rubens' The Judgment of Paris is not waiting around for Paris' decision in the mythical beauty contest but has fled to contemporary space and time, modestly covering herself with her exaggeratedly long tresses while trying to run from male hands reaching into the picture, grabbing at her hair to hold her back.

A similar theme is seen in a black-and-white photo from 2006 titled Photography Like a Shield. Leele stands behind the lens of a Nikon camera, wide-eyed in alarm but ready to take action by pressing the shutter, as hands reach menacingly toward her from outside the frame. Like the earlier feminist artist Sarah Charlesworth, she has made photography itself the subject, undermining the dominance of the male gaze by picturing herself behind the camera.

The photos installed in the upstairs space of the gallery are a mix of black-and-white and digital color that make reference to a variety of sources, from Surrealism to the land art of Robert Smithson to the self-portraits of Cindy Sherman. One of the pictures appears to be a casual snapshot of fellow students taken outdoors during a summer photography course, with several of the subjects aiming their cameras right back at her.

In the 1970s, Leele decided that in addition to photography she needed to paint, and gradually moved toward combining the two disciplines. After periods in New York City and Mexico, she returned to Spain in 1981 just as Movida - a cultural and social movement that emerged in Madrid during the early post-Franco years - was gaining momentum (the most famous name connected with it is filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar). In 2005, she won the Premio Nacional de Fotografia prize, which led to a return to photography. In 2008, after winning a Spanish national photography prize, she had a retrospective devoted to her and was chosen to represent Spain at the Cairo Biennial.

A couple of Leele's works that combine photography and painting are included in the Prague show. La Mirada de Eva from 2006 is a photographic portrait of a serious-faced woman; under her coat, a curly-haired, painted male figure seems to have sneaked out of a Baroque painting to play a game of hide-and-seek with the subject and the viewers. Another work in this vein is Corner of a Mouth? from 2006, in which the body of a woman facing out toward the viewers (but not meeting our gaze) is transforming into a second identity, as her arm and back mutate into a large nose and mouth.

This exhibition is an interesting choice for Prague, presenting an opportunity to reflect on feminist photography that was being created in the West in the 1970s and 1980s, well before similar currents took off here in the 1990s with artists such as Veronika Bromová. Prague audiences have had limited exposure to international feminist art from that period, the most notable exception being a large Cindy Sherman show at the Rudolfinum in 1998.

Sherman and other artists in the second wave of feminist photography (gender was not the primary issue for the first wave) created self-portraits and used female subjects as stand-ins to investigate identity politics, setting the stage for younger artists like Leele. What's not made entirely clear from the selection of works in this show, however, is how Leele has contributed to moving the dialogue in a new direction.

Mimi Fronczak Rogers can be reached at
Features@praguepost.com