WOMANKIND: María María Acha-Kutscher

The work of María María Acha-Kuscher (Lima, Peru, 1968) has an inescapable feminist component that functions as a central axis throughout her career. One of her main lines of work is made of of digital collages created from an indefinite accumulation of unindexed images, illustrated magazines, old books, advertisements, posters, albums or the web, in addition to others taken by the artist herself. Its objective is to form a fictitious, but plausible, archive that fables in a particular way about silenced stories of women of the past.

Among others, the exhibition includes the series Womankind (2007-), an artistic project that gives its name to the exhibition itself. The project as presented here gives continuity to the solo exhibition of the same name that took place at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge (Barcelona) in 2019. This materialized in 2007 and nearly 300 people participated in it, including associations against sexist violence, neighborhood 

associations, women and men artists... The result was hundreds of photographs of tributes, printed thanks to the Ayudas a la Creación de Matadero del Ayuntamiento de Madrid. This long-term project is set in a time slot that covers two important moments in women's history: the British suffragette movement of the early twentieth century and the massive introduction of the contraceptive pill in the sixties, a key period for female emancipation that allows them to overcome their passive role of subjugation at home and transforms, definitely, his relationship with men. Womankind is, in turn, the project that undoubtedly positions María María Acha-Kutscher as a feminist artist at a time when it was not so common for other artists to define themselves as such.

Another of the works that can be seen in the exhibition is La Rabbia di Proserpina (2022), a photographic polyptych composed of 12 images of female faces extracted from Renaissance and Baroque paintings, representing passages from the Bible and Greco-Roman mythology, where women are caught in violent acts, suffering or executing them. In this case, faces of terror, fear and fury are intermingled in this polyptych to become a piece of lament and rage, rage as an engine of change in the feminist imaginary.

María María Acha-Kutscher's growth and maturity as an artist has developed in parallel to the confluence of two global situations that we have experienced in recent decades, especially since 2005. On the one hand, the significant advances of the feminist movement generated by the fourth wave; on the other, the consolidation of the Internet, social networks and smartphones. These two transcendental circumstances, one linked to women's equality and the other to the way in which we relate to today's images, determine a new era where it is necessary to review the construction of our collective imaginary to understand where we come from and where we are going as a society.