From left to right: Chemin du Montparnasse, © Margot Montigny/AWARE; Barbara Hammer, The Female Closet, 1998, colour, sound, 60 min; Design by Lisa Sturacci studio, © AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibitions
Montparnasse – Bienvenüe metro station, Exit 2, Lines 4, 6, 12 and 13
Villa Vassilieff is accessible to visitors using wheeled devices or who have mobility difficulties thanks to special facilities (access ramp, adapted toilets, and a lift).
In addition, several reserved parking spaces are available close to the Villa Vassilieff:
• in front of 4 rue d’Alençon, 75015 Paris
• in front of 7 rue Antoine Bourdelle, 75015 Paris
• in front of 23 rue de l’Arrivée, 75015 Paris
Consult the map of adapted parking spaces in Paris here.
The traces of lesbian and queer artistic life are numerous, at least since the 19th and 20th centuries. However, these narratives remain on the margins of conventional art history, often rendered invisible within the very biographies of the artists, forcing history to adopt a narrow perspective. AWARE proposes a series of events focusing on Lesbian and Queer Presences in the history of 19th- and 20th-century art.
Many of these artists lived their identities to the fullest, allowing these identities to influence their work. Figures such as Rosa Bonheur, Lotte Laserstein, Romaine Brooks, Marie Laurencin, Gerda Wegener and Lili Elbe, Marlow Moss, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, or more recently Barbara Hammer and Laura Aguilar, to name just a few, have significantly shaped contemporary lesbian and queer art history and culture. Questioning lesbian visibility and presence means embracing the complexity and reality of the histories, creations, and cultural legacies of these artists.
This event will provide a historical overview of lesbian cultures and their artistic expressions since the early 19th century. Through signs of representation and identity formation still visible in artworks and photographs, these artistic depictions bear witness to, documents, and narrate this lesbian and queer history. They also serve as spaces and vectors for experimentation and identity construction, resonating across the centuries.
In a non-chronological approach, Catherine Gonnard will guide us through the 19th and 20th centuries up to the 1970s, using an extensive range of visual iconography. Marine Kisiel will discuss her current research for the exhibition “Dandykes! Le dandysme au féminin au XIXe siècle” to be held at the Musée Galliera in 2026. Additionally, there will be a presentation by ARCL – Archives Lesbiennes, offering a practical exploration of archives from the second half of the 20th century.
These presentations will be followed by a screening of Barbara Hammer’s film “The Female Closet” (1998, 57 min), hosted by the Centre audiovisual Simone de Beauvoir uses archives, interviews, and photographs to document the lives of 20th-century lesbian women artists.
This series of events is conceived by Ana Bordenave, with the assistance of Naemi Piecuch.
Practical information
Thursday 10 October 2024, from 6:00 pm
Screening of The Female Closet (1998, 57min) by Barbara Hammer, at 7:30 p.m.
The event will be held in French.The movie will be in English with French subtitles.
Free registration here.
Screening of The Female Closet (1998, 57min) by Barbara Hammer
Catherine Gonnard is responsible for documentaries in the scientific valorization department at INA. A specialist in the history of French women artists in painting and sculpture, she co-authored Femmes artistes/artistes femmes Paris 1980 à nos jours (Hazan, 2007) with Elisabeth Lebovici. She is a member of AICA (International Association of Art Critics) and FAR (Femmes Artistes en Réseaux), an organization working to build an archive of women artists’ groups from 1880 to 1995. Gonnard regularly writes and conducts research on LGBTQIA+ history and audiovisual archives.
Marine Kisiel holds a PhD in art history and is a heritage curator and research associate at the InVisu laboratory (CNRS/Institut national d’histoire de l’art). Formerly a curator at the Musée d’Orsay, where she organized numerous international exhibitions, and later co-editor-in-chief of the magazine Perspective, since 2022 she has been in charge of the 19th-century fashion department at the Palais Galliera, Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris. She is currently preparing the exhibitions Corps in-visibles. Une enquête autour de la Robe de chambre du Balzac de Rodin (Musée Rodin, 2025), Worth (Musée du Petit Palais, 2025), and Dandykes! Le dandysme au féminin au XIXe siècle (Palais Galliera, 2026). This fall, she is publishing Dérobades. Rodin et Balzac en robe de chambre, with B42.
ARCL – Lesbian Archives, Research, and Cultures, founded in 1983, they document the history of lesbian, feminist, and homosexual movements and groups. Its collections are divided into archives and a library (2,000 books), covering the period from the late 19th century to the present day. Weekly open hours allow several hundred people to consult the collections each year. The ARCL is entirely volunteer-run and operates on a self-managed basis.