With a line-up of more than two hundred works of art from the Viennese SAMMLUNG VERBUND, the Lentos Kunstmuseum shows how eighty-two female artists put question marks in the 1970s against the construct of the female. The exhibition extols the pioneering achievement of the ​“Feminist Avant-Garde”, a term coined by founding director of the SAMMLUNG VERBUND, Gabriele Schor, to enlarge the artistic canon. For the first time in the history of art, artists in different continents jointly focussed on the suppression of women. For this purpose, they used their own bodies as a social sign. They critiqued their reduction to the roles of mother, housewife and spouse; they made visual statements regarding such topics as claustro-phobic environments, female sexuality, and the pressure to be beautiful, and revealed the huge number of female identities. It is most remarkable that these artists developed strategies that are similar in formal terms, even though they were not aware of each other. Keeping their distance from male dominated painting, they chose such media as photography, film, and performance, which are historically less ​“biased” by comparison. Following the motto that ​“the personal is political”, these artists reflected on traditional social expectations that women are supposed to meet and countered them with a great deal of irony. mehr