After the Silence -Women of Art Speak OutA Handbookaf Birgitte Anderberg, Cecilie Høgsbro Østergaard, & Rebekka Laugesen

With the exhibition After the Silence – women of art speak out, SMK sheds new light on a range of women artists who delve unflinchingly into major political themes of the past and present.Here you will find melting letters and monumental tapestries, video works, installations, paintings, prints, clay tablets – and not least a hovering airplane. A total of 130 artworks by 18 acclaimed Danish and international artists are on display. The works span the period from the 1920s to the present day and the featured artists artists are Käthe Kollwitz, Hannah Höch, Hannah Ryggen, Nancy Spero, Paula Rego, Dea Trier Mørch, Kirsten Christensen, Ursula Reuter Christiansen, Kirsten Justesen, Lene Adler Petersen, Jenny Holzer, Mona Hatoum, Shirin Neshat, Pia Arke, Simone Aaberg Kærn, Jeannette Ehlers, La Vaughn Belle, and Tabita Rezaire.Above: a microglobal performance #1 (detail), Concept: © Simone Aaberg Kærn. Photo: Magnus Bejmar. 

The exhibition takes its starting point in the 50th anniversary of the Redstocking movement and the 1970s struggles to bring about a more peaceful, more equal and freer world. From here, we go back another fifty years in time and fifty years ahead, showing how women artists then and now have used art to express resistance and criticism.All in all, visitors can explore more than 130 works by eighteen women artists from Denmark and abroad, all of them moving, shaking, provoking and confronting their viewers.

This handbook guides you through the exhibition. Along the way, we will look at selected works as art history sees them and as contemporary activists read them. At the back of the book you get to join the conversation.