The Most Inspiring Female Artists

Bharti Kher

(* 1969, London)

The artist, who has lived and worked in New Delhi since 1993, reflects on the state of women in the world in general and specifically in India, seeing herself as an artistic ethnographer.

Kher‘s central motif in painting is the bindi, which comes from Hindu tradition and is an ancient symbol of beauty and spiritual awareness. Women in India wear the bindi on their foreheads every day. Kher transforms and “paints“ artworks with the stick-on-dots; e.g. her life-size elephant sculpture from 2006, The Skin Speaks a Language Not its Own, has a surface consisting of innumerable bindis. This piece was her breakthrough into the international art scene.

Her oeuvre includes painting, sculpture, ready-made objects, hybrids, and installation. Kher’s art combines aesthetic, political, traditional, and post-colonial aspects. An important part of her work deals with representations of the female body.

“All artists are deeply influenced by where they work and live,“ she said in an interview in 2015. “When I want you to look at my work, I want you to experience it physically.“

Photo Credits: Anay Mann, Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth 2010 © Anay Mann/Photoink

Laure Prouvost

(*1978, Croix-Lille, France)

Prouvost, who lives and works in London and Antwerp, works in different mediums: painting, video, sound installation, film, and performative work. In her videos she mixes objects, images, fact and fiction together. The viewer becomes a kind of participant and almost dives into her haptic celebration of colour, scent, and story, animated by his/her own memory. She plays with clichés, emotions, and sensations in an often humorous way.

It, Heat, Hit (2010) is a rapid succession of images interrupted by text fragments and threatening noises. The artist’s off-screen seductive voice adds another narrative strand. Overload is part of the sensation. One of her stylistic elements is addressing the viewer in a very direct way, wanting to engage her audience almost physically, wanting them to “smell“ her work:

“My art is about blurring the boundary between fiction and reality. It is about audience – about digging deeply and, maybe, getting lost.“ She said in an interview in The Guardian in 2015.

Photo Credits: © Giorgio Benni, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Caline Aoun

(*1983, Beirut)

Her work consists of images, videos, and installations. Aoun lives and works between Beirut and London. She connects strategies from conceptual art and minimalism with the question of how the development of digital technologies changes our perception of images and information in a globalized world.

Aoun‘s environmental installation Contemplating Dispersion, 536 ml (2018) covers the exhibition wall with sheets of colored rice papers. From sheet to sheet the color disappears more and more. It shows a printing process, where the color slowly changes from totally black to the absence of color.

“Today’s digital technologies are increasingly becoming the main medium through which we experience the world. The idea that we can no longer avoid seeing the world through it is not very comfortable. And while we constantly need to verify information, trusted answers, and scrutinize images, our responsibility is to share better, use it better, and contribute better,“ she told FemaleOneZero in an email from Beirut.

Danica Dakic

(*1962, Sarajevo)

The artist works and lives in Düsseldorf and Sarajevo. In various media–video, sound installation, film, and performance–she explores cultural identity and memory, history, and language in their permanent transformation. Migration is also a recurring motif in Dakic‘s oeuvre.

One of her iconic pieces, El Dorado, a sound installation she created for documenta 12 in 2007, is cross-cultural and cross-national; against the backdrop of the panorama wallpaper Eldorado (1848) from the Tapetenmuseum in Kassel, she projects wishes, dreams, and longings of migrant teenagers who lived temporarily in a residential home for separated underage refugees in Kassel.

When asked whether growing nationalism all over the world no longer leaves any room for utopian places, she told FemaleOneZero in an email, “Perhaps, but in times of growing nationalism, however, the desire to find utopian places for oneself also grows.“

Photo Credits: © Egbert Trogemann / VG- Bild, Bonn

Zanele Muholi

(*1972, Umlazi, Durban, South Africa)

Zanele Muholi, who lives and works in Johannesburg, describes herself as a “visual activist“ and is also an activist for the South African LGBTI community. Even though South Africa legitimized the rights of same-sex weddings in 2006, sexual minorities are often victims of discrimination, assault, and murder.

Muholi‘s declared aim is to rewrite the history of black homosexual women and transgender people in South Africa through ongoing photo projects in black and white; Face and Phases (started in 2006) is  an archive of photographs of South Africa’s black lesbian community. In 2014 she started the project Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail The Dark Lioness). Muholi turned the camera on herself against different backgrounds, showing herself with historically loaded props, e.g. wearing a metal chain, or putting rubber tyres around her neck in reference to “necklacing“.

“The black body itself is the material, the black body that is ever scrutinized, and violated and undermined,“ she said in an interview in The Guardian in 2017.

Photo Credits: „Bakhambile, Parktown (from the series Somnyama Ngonyama)“, 2016
Silver gelatin print, 80 x 60 cm / 31 1/2 x 23 2/3 in Courtesy the artist Courtesy the artist, Wentrup, Berlin; Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York