FRANCIS SULTANA shares his seventh monthly arts and culture column in collaboration with Times of Malta, in which he presents a set of must-see international exhibitions shedding light on art by women.

Last month, I talked about how thrilled I was by both the US and the UK pavilions at Venice, showing the work of Simone Leigh and Sonia Boyce. The black female voice, which for so long has been suppressed in the history of art, is alive and well. Throughout Venice, the myriad of female voices, from all walks of life within contemporary art, is something that now more than ever is an essential part of our cultural dialogue around the world.

Whether it is a conversation about women’s role in society or politics or a general commentary on the female viewpoint, I for one am delighted that in London right now, there are several exhibitions running concurrently showing work by the most exciting female artists, whose work has continued to push boundaries over the past few decades. 

Lubaina Himid

The artist Lubaina Himid is on show at Tate Modern until July 3. An artist with a powerful and poetic voice, Himid was an influential figure in black British art in the 1980s, and in 2017 she won the Turner Prize. Tate Modern is showing Himid’s largest solo exhibition to date, incorporating new paintings and significant highlights from across her remarkable career.

Taking inspiration from the artist’s interest in opera and her training in theatre design, the show unfolds across a sequence of scenes asking questions about our built envi­ronment, history, personal relationships and conflict and how they shape the lives we lead.

Everyday objects, texts and sounds and a series of installations engage the viewer with their storytelling.  As the artist says: “I have always thought of my work as starting when people get to see it. For me, nothing starts until then.” 

Throughout the exhibition Himid’s fascination with pattern is apparent, no doubt due to her mother’s career as a textile designer.  

Louise Bourgeois

Another major artist who was hugely influenced by her family’s textile restoration business was Louise Bourgeois. Running for another couple of weeks, I would urge you to go along to the Hayward Gallery and see Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child – the first major retrospective of this legendary artist to focus exclusively on the works that she made with fabrics and textiles during the final few years of her career.  

Exhibition view of ‘Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child’ at the Hayward Gallery in London. Photo: Mark Blower

The exhibition focuses on the mid-1990s until Bourgeois’s death in 2010 and looks at identity, sexuality, family relationships, reparation and memory. In her own words, the artist called “the magic power of the needle... to repair the damage” and to offer “a claim to forgiveness”.  Like Himid, Bourgeois has created a range of sculptures using domestic everyday objects and textiles, including clothing, linens and tapestry fragments.  Featuring around 90 works, one of the standout pieces is Bourgeois’s monumental Cells, in which hanging configurations of old dresses, slips, and nightwear directly reference her personal history.

Within the exhibition many of the figurative sculptures are missing limbs and heads or have fantastical bodies that call to mind characters from unsettling fairy tales.

Cornelia Parker

Cornelia Parker’s first major London exhibition opens at Tate Britain on May 18. Like Himid, Parker first came to prominence in the 1980s with her large-scale suspended installations. Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991), which shows a garden shed frozen at the moment of explosion, is still one of the most compelling pieces I have seen over the past few decades.

Like the other artists mentioned in this month’s column, Parker utilises all manner of found and everyday objects with which to create her works that are immersive, discussive and cover multiple media from sculpture, film and photography to drawing.

‘Cold Dark Matter – An Exploded View’ by Cornelia Parker

Parker manages to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. Her more recent work War Room (2015) is a room-sized work created from the reams of perforated red paper negatives left over from the hugely successful Royal British Legion remembrance poppies.  Magna Carta (An Embroidery) 2015 is a 13-metre long collectively hand-sewn embroidery of a Wikipedia page, which involved over 250 volunteers, including public figures, human rights lawyers, politicians and prisoners.

Like her fellow artists, Parker blends societal and political commentary across her work, and in 2017 she was the first woman appointed as the official artist for the UK gene­ral election.

Stay tuned for the next monthly cultural column in June. If you would like to check out what I am up to each month, follow me on Instagram @francis_sultana.