kestnergesellschaft presents Linder: Woman/Object an exhibition on view through 4 August 2013, the first institutional solo exhibition by Linder Sterling in Germany. The artist, known as “Linder,” is one of the protagonists of British late-1970s punk. With around 200 works, the exhibition in Hanover conveys an extensive overview of her varied output.
Linder’s artistic practice has always covered art, music, dance and fashion, and unites various media, such as collage, photography, video and performance. With her uncompromising feminist approach, she questions socially coded and culturally rooted ideas about gender and the sexual marketing of the female body. Since the beginning of her career Linder, has drawn from the inexhaustible source of home-making and porn magazines, which she puts together in Dada-like collages. The construction of social identities is reflected in Linder’s own self-staging, whether as the subject of her self-portraits or in the musical and choreographed performances that she develops for museums and theatres.
Linder Sterling was born in Liverpool as Linda Mulvey in 1954. At the end of the 1970s she was a key figure in the culturally explosive period of punk and post-punk, along with bands such as Buzzcocks, Magazine, Joy Division or The Smiths and its singer Morrisssey, with whom she is still linked in friendship and artistic collaboration. One of her most well-known works was the legendary cover of the Buzzcocks’ single “Orgasm Addict,” which showed a naked woman with grinning mouths on her breasts and an iron in place of a head. In 1978 she was a co-founder of the post-punk group Ludus, whose singer she remained until the band split up in 1983. She caused a furore in 1982 by appearing—a quarter of a century before Lady Gaga—in a dress made of scraps of poultry. Linder’s work has become internationally known in recent years through presentations at important institutions such as the ICA in London, the Tate or with a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1, New York.
The retrospective at the kestnergesellschaft is a cooperation with the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, where the exhibition was shown in spring.
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