Justine Kurland, Paris Internationale
Higher Pictures Generation presents an exhibition of new photographic collages by Justine
Kurland at Paris Internationale.
In 1967 the radical feminist and writer Valerie Solanas sold copies of her newly authored
SCUM Manifesto on the streets of New York’s Greenwich Village, charging $1 ($2 if the
buyer was a man). It opens with an incisive description of her project: “[. . .] SCUM
(Society for Cutting Up Men), which will eliminate through sabotage all aspects of society
not relevant to women (everything), bring about a complete female take-over, eliminate
the male sex and begin to create a swinging, groovy, out-of-sight female world.”
Kurland’s Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books is an object-based, tactile imagining of
matriarchal paradise, which she explored in her earliest body of work, Girl Pictures
(1997–2002), and again in Mama Babies (2004–07). Seeking and picturing freedom, at
the core of much of Kurland’s work, is located here in the artistic act itself: Kurland is
purging her own cherished library of photography books authored by white men.
Historical figures who have become the foundation of the history of photography, and
their contemporary male heirs by primogeniture, have their pictures chopped up and
reauthored by Kurland. The nature of collage—heterogeneous, pulled apart, shape
shifting, disrupted, cyborg, fantasy—has long made it a feminist strategy in life and in
art. Kurland’s is a restorative and loving ritual. Each collage is a reclamation of history; a
dismemberment of the patriarchy; a gender inversion of the usual terms of possession;
and a modest attempt at offsetting a life of income disparity. Before making the work
available to collectors Kurland offered to sell them to the original photographers. None of
the men have taken her up on her offer.
Justine Kurland (b. 1969) studied photography at the School of Visual Arts and Yale
University. The two-person exhibition Bruce Kurland & Justine Kurland – Two Worlds:
Illusion & Document is currently on view at the University of Buffalo. Her work was
recently included in the 2020 Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie, Mannheim, Germany and
in exhibitions at CEPA Gallery, Buffalo; and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York. Kurland’s
recent monograph, Justine Kurland: Girl Pictures, was published by Aperture in 2020. She
is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York;
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New
York, among others.
For more information please contact Marina Chao at
marina@higherpicturesgeneration.com.