Ewa Partum

Ewa Partum (born 1945, Grodzisk Mazowiecki near Warsaw, Poland) is a poetry artist, performance artist, filmmaker, mail artist, and conceptual artist.

Education Beginning in 1963, Partum studied at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Łódź. She then went to the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1965, where she studied in the painting department.

Major works Partum engages in linguistic and performative play in an attempt to discover new artistic language. This search for a "new language" is rooted in her belief that painting has exhausted its potential to generate new or transformative ideas. In interviews, she speaks about the difficulties and discrimination that she has faced as a female performance artist. This bias inspired her decision to perform naked in many pieces. At one point, Partum declared she would perform naked until women in the art world obtained equal rights.

Partum's public work began in 1969 and continued through the seventies, integrating poetry and performance. In a performance called Change, in 1974, Partum had a makeup artist work on half of her naked body in front of an audience. She announced that she was a work of art, making her body an element of the feminist discourse. This can be used as an example of essentialism, in that art is about the woman's body, and using the body as a canvas in feminist performance.

Another work, Self-Identification (1980), included photomontages of her naked figure superimposed against scenes of Warsaw, among pedestrians, next to a policewoman, and in front of the presidential place, showing the controversial nature of the naked female body. The piece's title speaks to the complicated and fraught search for a female identity in a world in which the female body is often observed as a source of shock or shame.

Partum's work often focuses on the harm of traditional gender biases and expectations. For example, in Stupid Woman (1981) she performed exaggerated compliance to norms of female submissiveness and stupidity by "kiss[ing] hands of members of the audience, pour[ing] alcohol over [her] head, writ[ing] with whipped cream on the floor 'sweet art' - in other words act[ing] like a drunk and stupid woman." This expresses one of the themes of her work that includes parodying the manners in which women try to conform to men's idealized expectations of them. In an exhibition on the subject of the Berlin Wall, she photographs herself naked in high-heels, and holding up a big letter “O” in her right hand and a “W” in her left, signifying Ost-West Schatten, or east–west shadows. The content of one piece, Ten Meters of Film, draws a simple correlation between film length and running time, denoting on the screen the number of meters of film that have run through the projector (up to ten). Another short film display the artist's face in a variety of scenes with at least one feature obscured. The film calls into question the ability of the artist to fully communicate an idea, arguing that once the work is observed by another, the authority of the artist is lost. Of the films and of film as a medium, Partum as said, "It’s not dealing with aesthetics. It’s rather a new sort of philosophical practice that operates in the area in which the relation between the film image and the camerawork covers the whole interest in the film itself.” In interviews, Partum has celebrated the work of retrospective exhibitions, in that they allow the audience and critics to "trace the genealogy of the artist's language." W.O.R.K.S., Conceptual Graphics "Reading of Our World" in Calgary, Canada in 1973 Prospectiva 74 in São Paulo in 1974; International Exhibition of Mail Art ‘75 in Buenos Aires in 1975 The Film Festival "Film as Film - Film as Art" in Lodz in 1977 Quatro in Milan in 1982; Contemporary Polish Art in Berlin in 1984 Polska 86, an exhibition of 20th century Polish photography Black-and-White Poland in Paris in 1990 Jestesmy at Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw in 1991 WACK! Art in the Feminist Revolution at MoCA, 2007 For a Special Place: Documents and Works from the Generali Foundation Collection at the Austrian Cultural Forum, 2007