Cornelia Sollfrank: Revisiting Feminist Art – What we can learn from early Feminist Art
Talks on Curatorial Practice
23 OCTOBER 2026 / 17:00
ZK/U BerlinSiemensstr. 27, 10551, Berlin, Germany
In her exhibition Feminist Rage – Revisiting the SCUM Manifesto*, Cornelia Sollfrank presented the documentation ofher series *Revisiting Feminist Art* for the first time. Since 2006, the artist has been selecting female artists and worksthat, as a young artist, affirmed her critical stance toward the patriarchal art system, and she has been reenacting them:Valie Export’s “Mappe der Hundigkeit,” Annette Messager’s “Les Approaches,” and Niki de Saint Phalle’s “Peinture au Fusil.” These reenactments are not mere repetitions of past events. Rather, the repetitions create new performative situations in which meaning is reconstituted. A repetition simultaneously refers to the original action and alters it through its temporal and contextual shift.
For the current exhibition in Hamburg, she has subjected another early feminist work to critical scrutiny: Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto (1967/68). In this radical feminist manifesto, in which the author—in a deliberately provocative and polemical manner—argues that men alone are the cause of social oppression, violence, and injustice, she consequently calls for the abolition of patriarchy and a society governed by women.
The title SCUM stands for “Society for Cutting Up Men.” In addition to a reading in several languages (German, Turkish, Farsi, and English), visitors took part in a workshop on-site to assess the manifesto’s relevance today and used it as anopportunity to update it into a new manifesto.
Cornelia Sollfrank (PhD) is an artist, researcher and writer, living in Berlin. She studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and Fine Arts at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (1987–1994). She holds a PhD from the University of Dundee (United Kingdom) in which she investigated the conflicting relationship between copyright and art. Recurring subjects in her artistic and academic work in and about digital cultures are artistic infrastructures, new forms of (political) self-organization, digital authorship, aesthetics of the commons, critical data practice and techno-feminist practice and theory.
Free admission.
All talks in English.
All times CET/CEST.
On-site participation without registration. Application for online participation: curating.org