Petra Bauer: WE CALL YOU! Sisters! Mothers! Workers! 

WE CALL YOU! Sisters! Mothers! Workers! is the first exhibition in Australia by the artist and filmmaker Petra Bauer, who is based in Sweden. The exhibition brings together three films from her series Looking for Jeanne, made with a number of international collaborators: feminist organisations Southall Black Sisters and SCOT-PEP, filmmaker Marius Dybwad Brandrud, activist Carolina Sinisalo, curator Frances Stacey, and producer Marta Dauliūtė. Demonstrating Bauer’s commitment to exploring film as a political practice—a means of grassroots organising, community-building, and consciousness-raising—her collaborations often involve an exchange of knowledge with feminist activist organisations over several years.

The films take Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) as a point of departure, addressing a number of its themes, including motherhood and sex work. Long, uninterrupted scenes of domestic labour, such as preparing dinner, making coffee, and cleaning the bath, which are frequently held on screen until the task is completed, are one of the most original features of Jeanne Dielman. Bauer draws on this aesthetic strategy, carefully framing mundane tasks of cleaning and preparing food, making visible normally devalued forms of feminised labour. The series shows that these everyday tasks are integral to political organising and resistance.

Guest curator: Benison Kilby, PhD Candidate.

This exhibition is part of the inaugural Kinnane PhD in Art History by Exhibition supervised by Dr Paolo Magagnoli and Associate Professor Andrea Bubenik, School of Communication and Arts, Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. It is supported by a generous endowment from Paula and Tony Kinnane and by IASPIS, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee's International Programme for Visual and Applied Arts.