Witch Hunt features 16 critically acclaimed international artists who employ feminist, queer, and decolonial strategies to explore gender, power, and the global impacts of systemic patriarchy.
Witch Hunt is an international group exhibition showcasing the work of 16 artists who use feminist, queer, and decolonial strategies to investigate current and historical political events, social conditions, and overlooked or suppressed artistic legacies. The artists have demonstrated decades-long commitments to feminist creative practice as a subversive, expansive, and oftentimes collaborative methodology. Together their works provide an opportunity to examine ideas, expand awareness, and encourage dialogue about urgent contemporary issues such as the body and its vulnerabilities; women’s rights and representation; the erasure of women’s contributions to critical movements and histories; the impact of technologies of surveillance; environmental justice; the queering of political discourse; the imperative for feminist practice to be inclusive and intersectional; and the power of collective action. The 15 projects in Witch Hunt employ a variety of mediums—painting, sculpture, video, photography, sound, and performance—and consistently argue for the value of a critical feminist perspective within the subject matter, production, and presentation of contemporary art. Witch Hunt asks how artistic practices informed by feminist ideologies can meaningfully amplify debates within contemporary culture and politics. The projects in the exhibition constitute an art of resistance, disrupting cultural discourse and proposing new ways of thinking and enacting change at a moment of unprecedented suffering and upheaval across the globe.
Witch Hunt offers an incisive survey of complex and impactful practices by some of the most influential artists working today and includes newly commissioned works as well as major projects that have yet to be shown on the West Coast or in the United States. Together with the accompanying catalogue and a robust series of public programs and performances, the exhibition highlights artists from diverse cultural positions who argue for the productive capacity of subversive female voices in ongoing efforts to create a future characterized by equity and inclusion.
The exhibition is a collaboration between the Hammer Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA), and works are on view at both sites.
Witch Hunt is part of a nationwide initiative, the Feminist Art Coalition (FAC), in which dozens of arts organizations around the country have mounted projects that evaluate the legacies and current urgencies of feminist discourses. FAC is a platform for art projects informed by feminisms and fosters collaborations between arts institutions that aim to make public their commitment to social justice and structural change. The impetus for the FAC grew out of concerns about trends in international politics that further undermine the civil and human rights of women and queer and transgender citizens across the globe.
Artists exhibiting at ICA LA:
Candice Breitz (Born in South Africa, lives in Berlin)
Minerva Cuevas (Born in Mexico, lives in Mexico City)
Vaginal Davis (Born in the United States, lives in Berlin)
Every Ocean Hughes (Born in the United States, lives in Stockholm)
Lara Schnitger (Born in the Netherlands, lives in Los Angeles)
Artists exhibiting at the Hammer:
Leonor Antunes (born in Portugal; lives in Berlin)
Yael Bartana (Born in Israeli, lives in Berlin)
Pauline Boudry (Born in Switzerland, lives in Berlin) & Renate Lorenz (Born in Germany, lives in Berlin)
Shu Lea Cheang (Born in Taiwan, lives in Paris)
Bouchra Khalili (Born in Morocco, lives in Berlin)
Laura Lima (Born in Brazil, lives in Rio de Janeiro)
Teresa Margolles (Born in Mexico, lives in Madrid)
Otobong Nkanga (Born in Nigeria, lives in Antwerp)
Okwui Okpokwasili (Born in the United States, lives in Brooklyn)
Beverly Semmes (Born in the United States, lives in New York City)