The five exhibitions presented here were curated in cooperation with art insitutions in San Sebastian , Gdańsk, Utrecht, Cape Town and Leuven and are part of The Realising Women and Girl’s inclusion, representation and empowerment (RE-WIRING, https://re-wiring.eu/) project, a 3-year project (2023-2026) that is located across six different national contexts (Belgium, Netherlands, Poland, South Africa, Spain and the United Kingdom).
Through transformative research, RE-WIRING seeks to rewire institutions to prevent and reverse gender inequalities, catalyse change processes, and actively involve diverse stakeholders in the research process. This approach generates socially robust knowledge necessary for sustainable and enduring transitions towards a more inclusive and equal society. How can intersectional gender inequalities across society, globally and locally – in families, education, law, politics, education, corporates, workplaces, the media – be systematically challenged and transformed? How can institutions in Europe and (South)Africa foster long-term inclusion, just representation and empowerment of girls and women at institutional, experiential and symbolic levels?
These are the key questions driving the RE-WIRING project, a transnational research project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement no 101094497).
MOED.online’s contribution to the RE-WIRING project features a series of five exhibitions, each exploring gender inequalities through art and material culture. These exhibitions—held both online and in physical spaces—aim to challenge dominant gender representations and illuminate intersecting inequalities, since political and cultural transitions often go hand in hand. The implicit and explicit relations between aesthetics and politics form the focal point of the contribution of these exhibitions to the RE-WIRING project. Ever since it came into existence, within feminist and decolonial theory, the guiding principle has been, not only that it is important to lead different possible lives than those prescribed by traditional and/or conventional clear cut binary social roles, but also that it is just as important to have the opportunity to create new iconographies and new vocabularies to visualize and tell alternative stories about those alternative lives. Research has clearly established that the way in which we are used to telling stories, and thus making identity and meaning, is structured by a gender- class-, and colour-specific division of roles and tasks. That is to say we are dealing with a legacy of an ingrained division of binary power relations in our dominant narrative and visual technologies. Therefore, undoing rigid patterns in lived reality can only become structural when it is rendered present within the symbolic system—in the ways in which we visualize, think and talk about the world.
Rooted in the broader goals of RE-WIRING’s dedication to addressing structural gender disparities, the exhibitions thus provide tangible ways to disrupt normative gender binaries and open up alternative imaginaries of gender and other forms of binary and inequality. They emphasize materiality and reveal how gender, labour, mobility, and intersecting social identities are shaped and may be (re)shaped through interactions with physical objects, environments, and technologies.
Exhibitions
The online exhibition extraORDINARY WOMEN addresses the place occupied by women in the economy of the region Gipuzkoa (SP) – in sectors such as fishing, the textile industry, porcelain, glass, and food – through pieces and photographs that, due to their artisanal and artistic value, have been brought together by institutions such as GORDAILUA Gipuzkoa Centre for Heritage Collections for preserving movable heritage, San Telmo Museoa (STM) and Kutxa Fundazioa. The exhibition shows them to the public in a collection organised around an alphabet, which brings the reality, the past and the diversity of working women closer to the public.
How is a standard created? What criteria is it tailored to? What can the length of the pants and the depth of the pockets tell us about the world? The RE-FORM THE NORM exhibition (Gdańsk, PL, March 12, 2025 – April 14, 2025) asks these and many other questions in relation to the seemingly trivial issue of work and protective clothing for women.
The exhibition Good Mom/Bad Mom (Centraal Museum Utrecht, NL, March 28, 2025 – September 14, 2025) and the concomitant ABCdarium and catalogue Mothering Myths (Valiz, 2025) unravel the stigmas, clichés and stereotypes of mothering and motherhood through the lens of art and from a transhistorical and intersectional perspective. The exhibition deconstructs the traditional western concept of the individual mother situated in the private sphere and makes space for representations of collectivity as well as different forms of kinship and motherhood while raising political questions concerning self-determination and reproductive justice.
The exhibition And I, a newly evolved fish (Iyatsiba Lab Cape Town, SA, August 8, 2025 – October, 10, 2025) showcases Southern African art works that engage with oceans, bodies of water and beaches to challenge gender binaries and their intersections with coloniality, patriarchy, global capitalism and the Anthropocene. The exhibition brings together contemporary artworks as well as those in archives that think with water towards disrupting the entangled binaries of race, gender, sexuality and human-nature within the historical and continued dominance of colonial, capitalist and anthropocentric logics. It considers bodies of water, particularly oceans, as sites, subjects, and frameworks through which to imagine gender, sexuality, and power otherwise and within broader social and environmental justice goals. Such work further addresses the erasures of some bodies, knowledges, and histories both within dominant art and public representations, and in the public imaginary.
On the 14th of November, 2025, the exhibition Women on the Move KU Leuven (BE) will be launched in the city of Leuven.
