Anna Artaker

Austria (1976)
Biennale Images Vevey
2010
Unknown Avant-Garde

Anna Artaker considers the place of women in the early 20th century avant-garde. While compiling historical photographs of artist groups, she realized that no women were present. In a committed feminist approach, she decided to save them from oblivion by inserting herself among the men in the images and captioning those men with the names of the women artists who took part in the Dada, Surrealist or Bauhaus movements, but remained behind the scenes. The Unknown Avant-Garde project raises the issue of the role women played in the course of these artistic trends, in a history mostly written by men.