In Warsaw, ‘The Woman Question’ keeps us guessing

The query in the title of the sweeping exhibition ‘The Woman Question, 1550-2025’, now showing at Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art, is a fundamental one. Through this expansive presentation of figurative painting and sculpture by (and of) women, spanning nearly 500 years, we find more questions than answers, as the show opts for a welcome fluidity and incompleteness over any kind of all-encompassing certainty.

The querelle des femmes – a protofeminist slogan of the 1700s – is translated here as ‘the woman question’, but has also historically been understood as the 'dispute' of women, initially indicating a contestation over the nature or even existence of the category 'woman'. The phrase was subsequently taken up in the 19th century to define a struggle for basic rights, with the inquiry becoming one with more revolutionary stakes. But how are we to interpret it today? In the Polish context, as well as in many other democratic countries around the world, hard-earned women’s (as well as LGBTQ+) rights are being rapidly reversed.

The show fittingly opens with 3 Minute Scream, a 1977 video work by Gina Birch, an artist and member of the British punk band The Raincoats. Her low-volume but high-pitched scream reverberates from its perch above the main entrance, forming a furious sonic backdrop that lingers through the show. This initial gesture might be deceiving, though, as what follows feels decidedly more canonical than punk.

In a small side room with a limit of ten visitors at a time, Artemisia Gentileschi’s Susanna and the Elders (1610) is mounted next to Miriam Cahn’s Must Strike Back (2024), temporally uniting a large swath of the exhibition’s historical purview in a direct dialogue across centuries. Gentileschi’s iconic work explores the harassment of a 'virtuous wife' by two older men during her bathtime, while Cahn’s painting more abstractly depicts a femme body in the act of physically fighting a 'spectre of male sexual violence'. The content of this dialogue across time is clear, but the filmed performance Chiara Fumai Reads Valerie Solanas (2013), shown on an old-school television set in the corner of the room, spells out in no uncertain terms the rage expressed in both of the paintings.

The curatorial approach of Alison M Gingeras, despite the impressive transhistorical conversation it enacts and its undeniable aesthetic merits, is a decidedly institutional and scholarly one: the sections of the multi-room exhibition are devised in nine chapters, which sometimes read like teaching units in a Feminist Art History 101 course.

Despite the inclusion of a small portion of contemporary trans and queer positions – like Puppies Puppies’ (aka Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo) 2022 bronze cast statue or Ambera Wellmann’s 2019 painting In Media Res, for example – and relatively few non-white artists, the show largely mirrors a long-held historical take on women’s art, from Linda Nochlin to Griselda Pollock, falling prey to the parameters that necessitate the inclusion of certain kinds of works. As Gingeras concedes in an interview with Frieze: 'There were, of course, limitations due to pragmatic realities… I had to begin with what was historically available and then build the project outward from there.'

Of course, a blockbuster exhibition like this, mounted in one of the country’s biggest art institutions, demands a certain widespread legibility. Towards the end of the show, sections on motherhood and women at war (specifically in Poland and Ukraine, with other current conflicts conspicuously absent) ground us in a lived reality beyond the realm of women’s (self-) portraiture. While the practical parameters that the show’s curator contends with deny it the possibility of being truly groundbreaking, ‘The Woman Question’ provides a vivid cross-section of 500 years of women in art, resisting their erasure by yet another version of the art historical canon.

'The Woman Question, 1550-2025' at Warsaw Museum of Modern Art until 3 May

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