In 2018, the curator Catherine Taft began researching an exhibition on ecofeminism, assuming it would be a retrospective on a philosophy that had fallen out of fashion. Ecofeminism emerged from environmental, feminist, social justice and antinuclear activism in the 1970s.
The movement resists traditional systems of patriarchy and capitalism that it contends subjugate women and exploit nature. It advocates for embracing collaboration, recognizing humanity’s dependence on ecosystems and respecting all life as sacred.
But in the 1990s, critics accused ecofeminism of stereotyping and falsely equating women and nature. The backlash caused the movement to go dormant. Then Taft noticed a shift. The COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests shined a light on social and environmental justice, leading to a re-emergence of ecofeminism.
“People are using the term again and are excited to embrace ecofeminism as an approach,” Taft, deputy director of the Brick gallery in Los Angeles, said in a video interview. Consequently, she focused the show on the present and future, and reframed ecofeminism “as an expansive strategy for survival in 21st century life,” she said.
Taft’s exhibition, “Life on Earth,” opened Feb. 28 in The Hague, Netherlands. At the same time, TEFAF Maastricht’s Focus initiative is showcasing two historic and contemporary ecofeminist artists. Together, these shows illuminate the many facets of this evolving movement.
Juliana Seraphim
Fresh from bringing an ecofeminist exhibition to Frieze London 2024, Richard Saltoun Gallery is dedicating a TEFAF Maastricht show to the surrealist artist Juliana Seraphim, referred to in their news release as “an early pioneer of contemporary ecofeminist discourse.” Born in 1934 in Jaffa in southern Tel Aviv, Seraphim fled to Lebanon when the 1948 Arab-Israeli War broke out. As a painter, she was criticized by her fellow Palestinian artists for not addressing their cause.
“Juliana was much more focused on women’s liberation,” said Niamh Coghlan, director of Richard Saltoun Gallery, in a video interview. “She felt that women were the most beautiful forms and the most sensitive, empathetic creatures on Earth. That was what she wanted to paint.”
Seraphim, who died in 2005, saw a world marred by wars, inequalities, harsh living conditions and heartless social interactions. She wanted to show people what she called “a woman’s world,” infused with love, beauty, sensitivity and entanglement with nature.
In her work “The Eye,” Seraphim painted women wearing insect wings and diaphanous dresses laced with capillaries, gliding through buildings resembling stone hoodoos. “Dance of Love” portrays sunken machines and buildings beneath a female form triumphantly springing from a flower amid pink swirls and a stylized snake. In “Flower Woman,” a sphinxlike woman’s head envelops petals and a seahorse, while butterfly wings cascade down her back and blossoms fill her breast. All three works are included in the Maastricht show.
“You can see her playing with the way that the environment is the human body,” Coghlan said. “We’ve made a divisive point of saying that humans and the natural world are very different. But they’re the same thing. Juliana was interested in pulling them back together.”
Gjertrud Hals
When the Norwegian fiber artist Gjertrud Hals casts about for inspiration, her mind catches elements of women’s culture and the environmental destruction she has witnessed. Growing up on the remote island of Finnoya, in the 1950s, she witnessed the overfishing that collapsed the population of fish and whales, forcing many families, including hers, to leave Finnoya.
While living in the Norwegian fjords, Hals watched as a spectacular nearby waterfall was captured for hydropower. A year later, she and her husband launched a successful campaign to save a watershed from being dammed. Simultaneously, the feminist marches of the 1960s and the related push to elevate women’s crafts to fine art motivated Hals to learn weaving and embroider feminist quotes.
Today, Hals said she is less political. But ecofeminist themes will subtly saturate her solo exhibition at TEFAF, presented by Galerie Maria Wettergren. Her fishnetlike paper vessels conjure the shapes of seashells and wombs while honoring the feminine tradition of fiber arts and speaking indirectly of womanhood and nature. “On one hand, they are vulnerable; on the other hand, they are strong,” Hals said in a video interview.
In a nod to humans’ interconnectivity with nature, Hals muddles the natural and the human made. She fashioned shoes from roots and molded Japanese mulberry bark paper into small human heads, which she will display among similar-looking mushrooms plucked from trees.
In “Golden,” a copper net weaving has “caught” golden herrings and other animals that Hals cut out from the insides of Norwegian caviar mayonnaise tubes, perhaps questioning the value placed on the living world. In “After the Storm,” shells and pearls seem to have washed up into a wire net, offering a hopeful message. “We are in a political situation more and more, not only in Norway but in Europe and generally,” Hals explained. “And we are hoping that one day there will be a time after the storm.”
Life on Earth
In curating “Life on Earth: Art and Ecofeminism” — which debuted last fall at the Brick in Los Angeles and is on show at West Den Haag museum in The Hague through July 27 — Taft aimed to portray ecofeminism as an intersectional movement. She also wanted to inspire hope amid multiple planetary crises. “Part of my work is to show that working together and finding communities where you can make a change really does make a difference,” she said.
As such, a 24-hour online/in-person symposium on ecofeminist art will accompany the show on March 21. It will follow the sun from the Loop gallery in Seoul to West Den Haag to the Brick, encompassing communities of participants around the globe. At West Den Haag, the exhibition will feature nearly 20 artists from Colombia, Nigeria and other countries, many of whom merge eco-friendly lifestyles with their art.
The art collective Institute of Queer Ecology presents videos of caterpillar chrysalises to envision how capitalist extractivism — depleting nature and exploiting human labor to maximize profit — could be reconstituted, butterflylike, into a regenerative system. The artist Yo-E Ryou created a soundscape and underwater maps that chronicle her experience learning sustainable seafood harvesting from the female free divers of Jeju Island, South Korea.
Leslie Labowitz-Starus’s installation grew out of her 40-year art-life ecofeminist project, “Sproutime,” which blends a sprout-growing business, education at a farmers market, performance art and installations. At West Den Haag, she juxtaposes sprouts, soil and posters from women’s peace marches to illustrate how war destroys and contaminates soil, leading to food insecurity.
The show gives viewers “openings to look at the world from a feminist perspective, which is about care, nurturing and not being aggressive,” Labowitz-Starus said in a video interview. “We’re saying there’s another way to be in the world, and our consciousness has to evolve.”
