Environments are male? Are you kidding me? Are you serious when you say that! The exhibition “In Other Rooms” at the Haus der Kunst Munich shows early examples of female artists – diverse, entertaining, but also hard and demanding. A long overdue reassessment of an art form that is also influenced by feminist principles.
No, anyone who enters the room of the Brazilian Lygia Clark should not suffer from claustrophobic fears. But what does entering here mean? Usually shrouded in complete darkness, you grope and stumble over something round, brush against something warm and soft, then get blinded and squeeze through a structure that is supposed to give you nothing less than the feeling of being in a womb. Really not for claustrophobics! With “A casa é o corpo: penetração, ovulação, germinação, expulsão (The house is the body)”, Clark created perhaps the most immersive environment that the Haus der Kunst has to offer in the current exhibition “In Other Spaces”. The room, once exhibited at the 1968 Venice Biennale, is an extraordinary sensory experience, like a journey inside a female body.