Suvan Geer, Artist, Writer for the Los Angeles Times – USA – 1995

Sometimes it seems so complicated, this being human. Especially now, in the 90s. Maybe it always seems difficult for those whose age it is, but certainly it is no less difficult now. Churches, governments, institutions, and families are all coming apart at the seams. There is a massive reconstruction going on socially, politically and culturally.

We are fast becoming a global community. I can know what someone is having for breakfast in China, get them to fax me the recipe and have it myself for dinner the same night. In one day I can fly home sneezing from a cold caught in Russia, watch someone gunned down in a live telecast from Bosnia, adopt a rain forest in South America, and buy Florida oranges from a Mexican American at a Los Angeles Freeway offramp, never exiting my car, which was assembled in sections on at least three different continents.

What can I know of such a world? What can I know about myself in such a world? What can I know about you? And so, we talk. Dialogue has got to be the biggest growth industry for what remains of the century. From Internet to National Public Radio, the opportunities for conversation are exploding. People want to know about each other. They want to know about themselves. From reality programming where TV becomes the national town square sharing gossip and information, traveling at the speed of light down optic fibers, to magazines clearly labeled “People”, “Self”, “Us” and “Interview”, we are trying to get to know one another and ourselves.

Art too is in a process of dialogue. During the 1980s feminist scholars challenged the humanist notion of a unified, autonomous subject which had dominated the arts since the Renaissance. They demonstrated that there was no single experience of being male or female, only gender representations. They took apart the idea that any one culture spoke for all cultures, or that any representation contained absolute “truth” for all humanity. In part they did this by looking at the power structures at play in languages, both written and visual, which represent or encode reality. The result has been a growing cynicism and distrust of all means of communication, including art.

Postmodernism suffers greatly from its inbuilt mistrust of language’s codes. Constant analysis of the way economic, social and political powers fix and maintain themselves and their worldview has made many tests completely skeptical about their ability to say anything and contaminated by prejudice, or art’s ability to speak to anyone outside the artworld’s corridors. Having found all expression to be biased by culture, gender, or economics many artists have given up feeling that art can even address the large, most pressing question of this or any century – what it means to be human. (It’s a pessimism society, unfortunately, shares with its artists. No wonder so many people feel that there is so little they can do to mitigate the confusion of the fast transforming global society).

Yet we keep talking. There is something within the process of dialogue that human beings instinctively try to summon for themselves. This is naming. The power of language to change the world. It is an awesome power and it is both active and reflective at the same time.

“Dialogue is the encounter between men, meditated by the world, in order to name the world. Hence, dialogue cannot occur between those who want to name the world and those who do not wish this naming – between those who deny others the right to speak with their word and those whose right to speak has been denied them. Those who have been denied their primordial right to speak their word must first reclaim this right and prevent the continuation of this dehumanizing aggression.”

Women Beyond Borders is about dialogue. It’s a gathering together of women so they can identify themselves, which is – speak for themselves. It is an opportunity for reclaiming identity on a global scale by looking at the codes of self imaging in various cultures. The importance of this action in a global society cannot be under estimated. Dialogue which begins with the silent, speaking for themselves, expressing who they are, their experience or their desires, opens an avenue for exchange and communication. It is an opportunity to alter and inflect the ongoing dialogue of signs and symbols which seek to define who we are. It is in a very real sense a revolutionary act.

In America we have become accustomed to women speaking out, having our words weighed, our presence recognized. Although, in truth, this recognition is still mostly confined to white, upper and middle class women, still there is a general perception that all women are entitled to this kind of presence in the world. But this is not the experience of women internationally. And certainly not of its women artists.

Women Beyond Borders is a step in undoing the isolation and hopelessness of silence. It is not a panacea, a goal or a Band-Aid. It is simply a step. Next will be the visits between artists in various countries, the letters and the Internet communications. These are interpersonal communications which will be followed by more self exploration, expansion of presence, and confirmations of global and community importance. Although we are invited to witness these exchanges by viewing the various exhibitions, unless we actively join the discussions most will be invisible to us. Documentation will never fully reveal what this dialogue will mean to the participants. That is to be expected, and in no way diminishes what this gathering together will signify to the world. Because every revolution is people. Not crowds, or movements or armies, but individuals coming to a common understanding that they have power. That they can change the world. And it always begins with knowing who we are.

The Aspen Times July 4, 1991
Lori McCoy

This paradigm shifting workshop, Making Art as if the World Mattered, inspired Lorraine Serena to pursue a Public Practice project with several other artists. After a couple months of determination and collaboration, the Women Beyond Borders project was conceived.

ARTISTS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY EXPLORE A CHANGING ROLE FOR ART

Imagine a world in which the cry of “Art for art’s sake alone” is heard as loudly as “Art for society’s sake.”

Imagine art created not so much for sale, as for a seed – the seed of a new social consciousness.

Imagine art with a greater function than creating visual simulation or an investment value.

Imagine art with a heart – and a conscience – instead of a dollar sign.

These hopes and dreams are the motivating factors behind why writer/critic Suzi Gablik and performance artist Suzanne Lacy have brought together artists from all over the country for a workshop entitled, “Making Art as if the World Mattered.”

The workshop is being held this week at the Anderson Finch Arts Center as part of an interdisciplinary program to bring artists of different media together.

CHANGING WORLD

“The imperatives of a rapidly changing world are overwhelming. Art as a positive and compassionate response is becoming urgent. Much of modern art seeks to maximize profit rather than to serve social ends,” according to Lacy.

Using the issues of the Aspen community as a model, the 16 workshop participants are exploring how to use their art to address the needs, issues and problems of any community, including the global one.

As part of the workshop, the participants spent time in Aspen searching for issues and needs of the community. They also listened to several speakers from the Roaring Fork Valley who gave their perspectives on the area.

The goal is for the participants to turn that information into a proposal for a work of art — a work that creates an awareness of a need, or points toward a solution to a problem, or motivates the viewer to act in a positive way on an issue.

‘ECO-CENTRIC’

It is to be art not just for art’s sake, but for society’s sake.

It is to be art not just for profit, but for providing awareness. It is to be art not based on the “ego-centric,” but the “eco-centric,” as Gablik calls it.

Gablik believes the paradigm or societal consciousness of recent times, such as consumerism, commercialism, conflict, and any other mentalities which are based on exploitation, are headed for a “dead-end course.”

What is needed in the world and in art, according to Gablik, is a paradigm shift away from “exalted individualism.”

“We simply cannot stay committed to our ideals of freedom and self-expression while everything in the world unravels,” she writes in an article entitled “Changing Paradigms for the Artist.”

PARADIGM SHIFT?

Gablik and Lacy both believe the paradigm is shifting away from the old one, and they hope the new one will embrace a “new kind of freedom” in which people are free to help others while taking care of themselves.

They note that already some artists are becoming disenfranchised by the art world and are seeking some other basis to fulfill the commercially defined idea of success.

“The skills (they got out of the workshop) are secondary to the attitude shift and (giving) them validation and support for their disenfranchised thoughts,” said Lacy.

The new paradigm Lacy and Gablik envision and which they are trying to help create in others is based on “a condition of understanding the world in terms of the web of connectedness, rather than in terms of the individual and separateness,” Gablik explains.

She adds it would be a paradigm “Focusing on processes and relationships between things, rather than on the things or products themselves.”

At the end of the intensive, week-long workshop, Lacy and Gablik hope the participants will take away with them not only a new awareness and empowerment, but also a way to pass that awareness and empowerment on to others through their art.

Santa Barbara Magazine

Mary Heebner, Artist and Writer – USA – 1995

Just to set things straight, Pandora was the Athenian name for the Earth Goddess Rhea. The nasty little tale in which Hesiod, the Greek poet, blamed all the world’s follies and ills on a woman who opened up a box of Spites is “not a genuine myth but an anti-feminist fable, probably of his own invention” according to mythographer Robert Graves. “Pandora’s jar originally contained winged souls.”

The real Pandora is back in action. Because of an idea that began in Santa Barbara, two hundred women will be sending their “winged souls” out into the world, contained in tiny wooden boxes. The exhibit, Women Beyond Borders premieres at Santa Barbara’s Contemporary Art Forum November 4, 1995 and will travel to twenty countries ending up in Washington DC. in the year 2000 when a permanent home will be sought for the collection. “The care and work that went into transforming simple, inexpensive boxes into objects that are compelling and affecting must be seen to be believed.” comments Nancy Doll, CAF’s Director.

The homespun project that involves so many women artists began over three years ago when Santa Barbarans Elena Siff and Lorraine Serena played with the notion of a traveling women’s art show. “But the shipping costs alone would be impossible…unless what we made was tiny,” recalls practical-minded Elena. They grafted this fact onto an absurdly hopeful idea – women connecting with one another on a global level. With no format or venue, they proceeded through word of mouth to gather a small group of artists. The hardest part, which required more than a year of brainstorming, was coming up with the right vehicle for this concept.

A good idea can be right in front of you, and in this case it was right on the table. During an evening meeting someone noticed a little wood box stuffed with candies. “That’s it – a box!” And the project took wing. A practical size to ship, intimate, yet metaphorically expansive. The project began to define itself. Using the souvenir box as a prototype, Lorraine had 3 1/2” x 2” x 2 1/2” pine boxes made and distributed them to a group of Santa Barbara women artists. Several months later Isabel Barbuzza, Ciel Bergman, Sky Bergman, Rose Bilat, Beverly Decker, Elisse Pogofsky-Harris, Alice Hutchins, Evelyn Jacob-Jaffe, Saritha Margon, Lorraine Serena, Elena Siff, Maria Velasco, Victoria Vesna and I placed our box-assemblages on the table. Our art forms range from sculpture, installations, painting and writing, to weaving on the world wide web. Though we usually work alone, this project gave us the opportunity to be part of a unique network.

With an elfin industriousness we assembled information sheets, rubber-banded to two hundred boxes that we hand-glued together, and pooled our contacts in other countries. It was a little like quilting, where each person makes a piece that will eventually become part of a whole. The group fell into a working rhythm quite naturally, though Serena has been the mainstay of the project. “Building community is my art form,” she reasons, as she spends hours at the computer disseminating information, and assembling the necessary materials we’ve gathered in order to seek funding sources and confirm venues for the multi-sited exhibition.

Our hands-on process involved family members and friends. Our selection of countries was made simply on the basis that someone in the group knew someone else abroad. Maria Velasco contacted fellow artists and a curator in Madrid. Isabel Barbuzza enlisted the help of her thirteen year old son, Xavier, who hand-delivered plain boxes to Eliana Molinelli, a former art professor in Argentina. Eliana distributed the boxes to selected women artists. Elena Siff’s daughter Ravelle, a UCLA student studying abroad at Hebrew University in Israel received a letter from mom; “ You have an assignment. Find me an Israeli curator.” And she did. Daphna Naor represents several women artists from her home-based gallery in Jerusalem. She arranged for two exhibits in Jerusalem coinciding with an International Women’s Day celebration to be held there in 1996. “Women Beyond Borders could be a start of international communication …new ideas can emerge between the artists as a result of having open channels in a vital network.,” began her fax about scheduling. A friend of Elisse Pogofsky-Harris hand-delivered boxes to Cubana women and Elisse traveled to Italy to find an exhibition space in Tuscany. Beverly Decker arranged for a group of Native American women to represent their country within this country. Mari Olguin, visiting from Oaxaca, left my home with an information packet slipped in her suitcase and a week later we received a fax from Casa de Mujer’s (Women’s House) Director, Tanya Coen that opens, “we seem to have hit a small gold mine of Oaxacan women artists – send boxes ASAP!”

Santa Barbaran’s much coveted mañana-Zen lifestyle lends itself to a wild romanticism that allows one to dream. “This idea started out of frustration – feeling disconnected to a larger art world” Elena recalls, “but once we decided to have a group show, why limit it to a larger city – why not make it worldwide? If I had been living in L.A. I might never have gotten involved in this crazed notion.” Now, boxes and accompanying letters are arriving. They describe clusters of resultant spin-off activities in such places as Austria, Spain, Japan, Finland, and Italy. Within each country, Women Beyond Borders has served as a catalyst for bringing artists together, perhaps because of the utter simplicity and unrestricted quality of our proposal.

Most cultures have a tradition of working collectively, lending a hand. Native and pioneer Americans built kivas, raised barns, shared talk and talent in quilting, beading or basket making circles. It seems that the more self-sufficient we became the lonelier the act of making things became as well. Today many women are seeking ways to meet informally or collaborate on group projects as a step toward undoing the isolation of solitary work. This is a timely project that has netted an imagination beyond borders.

What’s in a box? Gifts are wrapped in boxes. A box’s exterior adornment may belie a troubled interior, or a treasure chest of memories, an inner world, a womb or a tomb. Is it an image of entrapment or seclusion or simply an empty stand used as a pedestal? The computer too is a box, through which thousands of messages are being transmitted worldwide to chart the progress of Women Beyond Borders. UCSB professor Victoria Vesna, one of the participating artists has facilitated this aspect, aptly dubbed “f-e-mail and beyond”.

The boxes started coming. We had no idea what to expect. Initially we had discussed themes for a group exhibition such as “self-portrait” or “women’s spirituality”, but this seemed like hyperbole. We wanted to be surprised by the unlegislated nature of the idea. We feared that any affiliation with Embassy programs or Museum Boards might impose a tangle of guidelines that would sap the energy from this grassroots endeavor. For centuries, women have communicated vital information to one another while attending to mundane domestic tasks. Word of mouth, folded into a larger conversation, is a hotline that simply works. We added the tools of modern communication technology to this age-old tradition, tailoring both styles to suit our needs for a rapid yet personal format.

One day Lorraine received an unexpected phone call. “Hi, I’m Yoni Waite from Nairobi. I’m at the Carpinteria Greyhound bus stop, can you come collect me?” Even though she was exhausted Yoni could barely contain herself as she pulled eleven transformed boxes from among wads of newspaper, “In Kenya women have been subjugated for years as chattels, but recently many have begun finding a voice…”. In the midst of helping Yoni unwrap the boxes Lorraine was hit with a profound sense of the project’s importance. “Because of Women Beyond Borders The National Gallery in Kenya has agreed to a first, an all woman show. These little boxes brought us together,” said Waite.

“Let things fall into place. This project has a life of its own,” advised Liz Brown, Curator of Twentieth Century art at the University Art Museum at UCSB. “That’s the beauty of it.” 
The spirit of cooperation integral to this undertaking cuts across cultural, religious and economic boundaries. Whether grouped thematically or clustered according to ways in which each artist draws from her countries’ cultural traditions, each box is a distinct portrait.

Several of the boxes use traditional motifs or materials. Many of the Mexican boxes are ornate reliquaries, encrusted with pigment, gold, and memorabilia. The Argentinians deconstructed their boxes to create sculptural balancing acts. The Parisian pieces are sleek and abstract. African women carved the box surfaces. The crouched body of a woman softens the hard edges of one box, within which sleeps a small infant. The Israeli group (including one Arab woman), use metal, concrete and wire – heavy visual interpretations of the trappings of endless conflict, linked with written messages stressing reflection and reconciliation.

The increased responsibility to effectively manage a project that has mushroomed has, of course, launched us into a new phase. Women Beyond Borders is now actively seeking volunteer help as well as private and corporate sponsorship to cover expenses for a full color catalogue, video documentation, a directory of participating artists, galleries and museums, and shipping costs. The word is out and a party line of women across the globe is open.

Individually, and as a whole, Women Beyond Borders is a visual anthology, a vivid tableaux of lives lived in community, fascinatingly diverse, slightly irreverent, confident and distinct. The warp of common themes and the woof of individual expression has created a fabric of the highest quality.

A map of the world hangs in Lorraine Serena’s studio, our usual meeting place. Red pushpins speckle the map, identifying participating countries. One or two exhibition spaces, a dozen women artists, adjunct workshops, discussion groups, and a complex web of fax, Internet and written communiqués dance on the head of each pin.

International Leadership Award

January 1, 2008
 

Women’s Enews is a globe-spanning nonprofit news service covering issues of particular concern to women and providing women’s perspectives on public policy. Every year the organization honors a small group of individuals and organizations at the forefront of supporting gender equality around the world as part of their “21 Leaders of the 21st Century” International Leadership Award. In 2008 Lorraine Serena was recognized as part of that group for her tireless work creating and expanding Women Beyond Borders from a small room of like-minded women into a movement that reaches out to encompass over 50 countries and countless individuals the world over.

Ivan Cankar Cultural Center

Ljubljana, Slovenia
October 8 – 13, 2001

Barbara Borcic, Director of Ljubljana Center for Contemporary Arts, WBB Coordinator
Koen Van Daele, Program Coordinator
Nada Beros, WBB Contact and Coordinator

 
The WBB exhibition in Slovenia was presented at the Seventh International Festival of Contemporary Arts – City of Women, as a permanent virtual exhibition at the Ivan Cankar Cultural Center.

A VIVID NETWORK

Barbara Borcic – SLOVENIA

WBB demonstrates an incredible richness and diversity, rarely seen in today’s art-scene.

Remember Mail Art? Lorraine Serena and Elena Siff – two committed artists from Santa Barbara, USA – decided to give the seventies’ term a completely different (female?) dimension. They mailed identical, miniature wooden boxes to curators and artists in over thirty countries. They asked each one of them to forward the boxes to up to twelve renowned or emerging women artists. And they invited each artist to interpret, manipulate, recreate the box, and then return it to sender. The result is Women Beyond Borders (aka WBB), an unprecedented cross-cultural exhibition, involving 600 artists, curators, and critics from around the globe. The boxes were transformed in a variety of ways via painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, photography, or mixed media. They were expanded, smashed, buried or deconstructed. Some artists kept the intimate character of the box keeping secrets or treasures, while others emphasized the claustrophobic notion. Every box contains its “message”, be it conceptual or figurative, dark or colorful, refined and sophisticated or rudimentary, provocative or pleasing, hidden or overt, enigmatic or manifest. Each box tells a different story. Each story is told from a different perspective.

In a time when it’s business as usual that one curator or one institution conceives, selects, and curates an exhibition, the founders of Women Beyond Borders challenge this common model by experimenting with, and re-introducing a collective approach. The surplus value is obvious: WBB demonstrates an incredible richness and diversity, rarely seen in today’s art-scene. And, more than just an exhibit, WBB is also a vivid network, connecting participating artists from around the world, fostering unique collaborations and spin-off activities. The transport from Austria to St. Petersburg in 1996 for instance was organized as a traveling sculpture, presenting 178 boxes in a train, accompanied by artists and journalists. Two years later 26 boxes travelled and were exhibited throughout Nepal in the context of a women’s activists trek.

“Building community is my art form” says artistic director and founder Lorraine Serena. Beside the artistic value of the individual pieces the collective dimension of the project is perhaps its most powerful characteristic. WBB is much more than the sum-total of its parts. In other words: these are boxes to treasure. Since 1992 Women Beyond Borders has toured through over thirty galleries and museums worldwide. From November on it will be on display at the Fowler Museum of Cultural History in Los Angeles. City of Women presents a permanent slide installation with a selection of exhibits from Argentina, Australia, Bosnia, Croatia, Cuba, Ecuador, Fiji, Guatemala, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Nepal, the Philippines, Tibet, Uganda, USA, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Zambia, and Slovenia. The participating artists from Slovenia are: Marija Mojca Pungercar, Ema Kugler, Janja Vrabec.

THREE SLOVENE ARTISTS

Barbara Borcic
February 25, 1998

For the international project Women Beyond Borders, I have chosen three Slovene woman artists: Marija M. Pungercar, Ema Kugler, Janja Vrabec.

In their art practice all three artists have been occupied by the question of woman and the position of woman artist in the society. In some specific aspects their artwork has been related to fashion. Two of them, Marija M. Pungercar and Ema Kugler, have been known as fashion, set, and costume designers. Their creations, however, have never been meant to be simply worn. They have always been used in the context of performance, exploring the symbolic, semantic, and visual possibilities of dress-as-object within the framework of a contemporary ritual. These experiences can be traced in their recent art practice.

Ema Kugler’s field of interest covers different media: performance, installation, and video. Her inter-media performances combine word, body-sculpture, movement, acting, video picture, and music. The performances form a basis for her video works of advanced technology questioning the relation between nature and culture, mythology and everyday rituals.

Marija M. Pungercar’s installations and performances are characterized by play and humor and are, at the same time, reflections upon the repeated everyday rituals, bond to place and time. We could say that the artist has become a contemporary nomad willing to share her experiences with others.

Janja Vrabec explores the relation between a painting (its margins and the decentered surface), real objects (clothes, a shoe, a handbag, flowers), ready-made images (shadow pictures), and the specific gallery space. The artist arranges the material into still lives, and finally freezes a chosen incident into a frame. Her recent objects derives from the artist’s own imagery. They are fragile personal memories, subtly transformed and combined into works of art.

SEE BOXES FROM SLOVENIA

Women Beyond Borders: THE ART OF BUILDING COMMUNITY

Anette Kubitza Ph.D., Art Historian – USA – 2005

As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, my country is the world.

– Virginia Woolf

Thinking and acting globally has many faces. Ideally, it includes creating an intercultural dialogue that fosters our shared responsibilities as citizens of this world. Women Beyond Borders, a cross-cultural art project founded with the goal of encouraging collaboration and community among women and honoring their creativity, has given new meaning to Woolf’s vision of female world citizenship. As this project has developed from a grassroots, local initiative to a savvy international art project, it has continued to challenge national, political, ethnic, religious, and aesthetic boundaries.

“THAT’S IT – A BOX!”

THE ORIGINS OF WOMEN BEYOND BORDERS

Santa Barbara artist Lorraine Serena initiated Women Beyond Borders in 1991 with Elena Siff with the objective of reaching out to female artists worldwide. Eager to leave behind the isolation of her home studio, Serena began to ponder organizing a traveling exhibition of art made by women in order to forge international connections. Over the years, she held a series of gatherings of artists and art professionals in her studio to generate ideas for this traveling show. At one such meeting, a small souvenir box caught the attention of the group. They decided that such a box—evocative of a vessel, womb, tomb, gift, or shrine—provided a powerful symbol for women. It also could be shipped inexpensively and would offer artists an inspiring form for expressing their thoughts and feelings. Having found a suitable vehicle for their concept, the group prepared instructions for participants and hand-glued 200 boxes to be sent abroad. They contacted female curators and artists in 15 countries who were asked to invite 12 women in their home countries to participate. Each participant received an identical pine box with a lid, measuring 3.5” long x 2” wide x 2” high. As a result of the first outreach effort by Women Beyond Borders, about 185 boxes were submitted. They were exhibited for the first time at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum in 1995. Since then, the project has drawn international attention and momentum.

Hundreds of boxes have been added to the project from Europe, Africa, Canada, North and South America, Asia, and Australia. The participants range from accomplished artists to women with no prior artistic experience. They are asked to transform the simple boxes using paint, sculptural objects, photographs, text, or any other materials they deem fitting—not to exceed 12 inches in any direction or four pounds in weight. The completed artworks reflect a wide diversity of artistic styles and concerns, from abstract and strictly conceptual pieces to narrative and nostalgic works. Some boxes represent, on a small scale, the spectrum of trends in contemporary art, while others are inspired by the cultural traditions of their creators’ home countries. Despite the high level of individuality reflected in the boxes, it is interesting to note distinctive traits that connect a group of boxes from one country—for example, playful irony in the British, elegant simplicity in the Japanese, and folkloric colorfulness in the Mexican. In most cases, the meaning of the transformed boxes exceeds their modest size. Not only are they repositories for the artists’ individual expression, but many also reflect personal, political, and economic realities—as well as the hopes and joys experienced by women everywhere.

SPREADING THE BOX

WOMEN BEYOND BORDERS AROUND THE GLOBE

The stated mission of Women Beyond Borders is to honor and document women’s voices and visions, to build community through dialogue and collaboration, and to inspire all women to express their creativity. The process of building community, which Founder and Artistic Director Lorraine Serena considers part of her artistic practice, lies at the heart of the project. Women Beyond Borders has become a catalyst for women’s art activities and cultural exchanges wherever the boxes are shown, as Serena and her small staff coordinate worldwide requests for exhibitions, solicit boxes from new countries, and communicate with curators and participants.

However, this success is also owed to the determination of the many women worldwide involved in this project. Today, Women Beyond Borders has grown into an international art project involving over 1,000 participants in 37 countries, including several dozen curators and 700 established and emerging artists who have created box assemblages. Over 30 exhibitions plus special events in museums, galleries, and alternative venues on all continents have been organized, as well as numerous adjunct exhibitions, women’s support groups, panel discussions, and workshops for women, men, and children.

Women Beyond Borders is not a simple exhibition—packed, shipped, installed, and opened—it comes with cultural baggage and a political imperative. The organizers took on diverse challenges, sometimes even personal risks, to meet that imperative. Each country hosting Women Beyond Borders developed a unique format and context for the boxes, depending on the availability of space and funding as well as the interests of the foreign curators. In Jerusalem, Israel, boxes were exhibited to coincide with an International Women’s Day celebration; in Basel, Switzerland, a selection of boxes was featured alongside a show of ancient Greek art entitled Pandora—Women in Classical Greece; in Oaxaca, Mexico, an exhibition of boxes was part of a program on women’s health issues. Boxes were taken in a suitcase by California women on a trek to rural Nepal to help educate the women there about health care, domestic violence, and human rights. Boxes were shown in settings as diverse as the National Museum of Kenya, the Wifredo Lam Center in Havana, a mall in Toronto, a restaurant in Zagreb, and Stansted Airport near London. Each exhibition proved to be an adventure as organizational obstacles, cultural differences, and national borders were overcome. For example, in 1996 a group of Austrian artists from Graz decided that an installation that could literally travel would be a fitting format to go with the theme of overcoming borders. The artists—Doris Jauk-Hinz, Veronika Dreier, and Eva Ursprung—rented a Russian sleeper and displayed the exhibition in cases installed between the sleeping berths, intending to convert the train car—a box itself—into a mobile sculpture. The exhibition was made accessible to the public en route from Graz to St. Petersburg via Vienna, Budapest, Lvov, and numerous towns in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Russia. However, as the train moved farther into Eastern territory, world views, values, and notions about “women,” “art,” and “nationality” changed rapidly. The artists accompanying the exhibition observed that the objective of fostering worldwide communication among women via small boxes became more questionable. They were challenged by puzzled viewers and unsympathetic border officials. Upon their arrival in St. Petersburg, they learned that the boxes would have to go into storage until a place and money to display them could be found. Four months later, the exhibition was finally shown at The Russian Museum. Afterwards, the boxes were secretly hand-carried out of the country in two suitcases to reach their next destination, The National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi, since the visa necessary to export them officially had been retained at one of the border crossings.

The exhibition coordinators were not the only ones challenged when Women Beyond Borders traveled to its first Southeast Asian destination in spring 2001. Singapore curators Joyce Fan and Susie Wong took Women Beyond Borders to a more complex level. They invited local artists to create boxes based on an interrogation of individual identity in relation to a specific community they would engage with over several weeks—from as small as a family to as wide as the world. In response, a number of women explored their experiences as members of the many expatriate or minority sub-communities living in Singapore. Others entered into a dialogue with their religious or aboriginal communities, or gathered material from a group of women for their boxes (such as recipes, memories, remedies, or kitchen conversations). One artist enclosed statements written by Women Beyond Borders participants in her box—turned into a time capsule to be opened in 50 years.

As the Women Beyond Borders project meets with growing interest, it is adapting to ever new and diverse contexts and audiences. With recent exhibitions at highly public spaces, such as the Ontario Airport near Los Angeles and the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City—and with its newly launched “daughter” projects, the international Children Beyond Borders and the California initiatives Youth Beyond Borders and GIRLS/Stepping Outside the Box—Women Beyond Borders has indeed become an international art project catering to mass audiences. From early on, Women Beyond Borders has fostered relationships with students from the elementary level through high school and college. In recent years, however, the project has opened up in particular to children and young women through workshops and adjunct exhibitions. When Women Beyond Borders toured Australia in 1999, one of the satellite exhibitions organized was Grrrls Beyond Borders. Over 200 boxes created by female high school students from Sydney were shown simultaneously with the international Women Beyond Borders boxes at Sydney University’s Tin Sheds Gallery. Most recently, a worldwide initiative called Children Beyond Borders was launched by Art Access Gallery in Salt Lake City in collaboration with the international organization Very Special Arts. This project involved several thousand children with disabilities from 33 states and 19 nations; their boxes were exhibited at the Cultural Olympiad in Salt Lake City in 2002 as well as in their respective states and nations.

WOMEN ARTISTS’ MOVEMENTS, MAIL ART, AND NEW MEDIA

AN ART HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The Women Beyond Borders project is positioned at a crucial intersection in today’s art. While the inspiration for Women Beyond Borders is rooted in the history of U.S. feminist art and politics of the past three decades, the project’s concept and vision are pointing to an increasingly globalized, multicultural, and digitally connected future. The founders of Women Beyond Borders have been hesitant to label their work feminist. However, the feminist and women artists’ movements emerging in the late 1960s in the United States and Europe can be considered a crucial inspiration for the project. In particular, project founder Lorraine Serena was inspired by a workshop titled Making Art As If the World Mattered, taught by well-known feminist artist Suzanne Lacy and art theorist Suzi Gablik.

The form and content of Women Beyond Borders take up many of the criticisms the women artists’ movement has leveled at established art practice since the early 1970s. One of the fundamental issues taken on by that movement was to question dominant notions of art, genius, and greatness in art, which in the past have functioned to exclude women from art training and acknowledgment in art historical publications. With its striving for inclusiveness, Women Beyond Borders has raised fundamental questions about what is considered art and who can be considered an artist. The process of building community, which Serena considers part of her artistic practice, lies at the heart of the project. While Women Beyond Borders rests on the creation and exhibition of actual art objects—the boxes—the project’s uniqueness lies in the network its founders have built together with supporters all over the world.

With its goal to connect women, the Women Beyond Borders project has followed a tradition in feminist art making since the early 1970s. Historically, feminist community building originated with the consciousness-raising process, in which women gathered to share deeper concerns about their lives. On the West Coast, for example, artists Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro integrated the concept of consciousness-raising into their path-breaking feminist art education programs. The emphasis on community building has continued to be explored in artworks by many feminist artists. Chicago embarked on a large-scale artwork from 1974-1979, The Dinner Party, consisting of a monumental triangular dinner table elaborately set for 39 women from the mythic beginnings to the present. The artist worked locally with over 400 volunteer collaborators who created, among other things, the exquisitely crafted table runners. She also reached out to women internationally with a quilting bee. Supporters of Chicago’s project contributed triangular-shaped commemorative quilts for women of their choice that were exhibited along with Chicago’s dinner table. Further, Lacy, who had been a student of Chicago and Shapiro, organized an event designed for the opening of The Dinner Party at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in March 1979, which she entitled The International Dinner Party. She sent over 1,200 invitations to women all over the globe asking them to come together for ritual dinner parties, which they would dedicate to women or women’s causes they chose. Lacy conceived this 24-hour event as a performance through which the contemporary lives and loving connections of women around the world would find expression, and asked the diners to send telegrams or cables to the project’s office, where she indicated on a large wall map the places where the dinner parties took place. Future exhibitions on several continents of The Dinner Party itself sparked grassroots organizing as well as women’s events, from informal discussion groups to elaborate galas.

As mentioned above, the work of Lacy in particular served as an inspiration for the founder of Women Beyond Borders. Lacy, one of the most prominent artists committed to large-scale community projects, developed several public performances involving large groups of women. In her activist performance In Mourning and in Rage of 1977, a group of Los Angeles women commemorated the victims of the infamous Hillside Strangler on the steps of City Hall. More recently, Lacy’s 1987 Mother’s Day performance Crystal Quilt involved 420 older women sitting around tables in groups of four in downtown Minneapolis, discussing their concerns.

While many of the feminist art projects described above were concerned with a more immediate notion of community and togetherness, Women Beyond Borders has relied on and conceptually integrated international communicative networks such as the postal service (for sending the boxes; small for inexpensive shipping) and the Internet (for communication among the participants and coordinators). The building of community through art by using international communicative networks has its predecessor in the mail or correspondence art that emerged in the 1960s. Postal art activities were practiced by members of the international Fluxus group and by the New York Correspondence School. The group’s name was a word play on the then-popular New York School of Abstract Expressionists, which relied on large formats and wealthy dealers. Mail artists, in contrast, considered the distribution of small, inexpensive items via the postal service a more democratic form of exchange.

In the 1970s, female artists already took advantage of these networks. A women’s postal art event called Feministo, for example, was initiated in Great Britain in 1975. Artists Sally Gallop of the Isle of Wight and Kate Walker of London sent small artworks back and forth that expressed their feelings of being confined by childcare and domestic responsibilities. As more women from England, Scotland, and Germany became involved, Feministo functioned as a lifeline for artists who felt trapped in their homes as mothers and housewives. It became a living process, a dialogue among its participants, with occasional exhibitions of the small artworks entitled Portrait of the Artist as Housewife.

Throughout the 1980s, many mail artists became networkers who pursued the intercultural transformation of information within a new global network— the Internet—carrying along with them the idealistic, democratic values of former postal art communities. Mail art found a parallel world online, and electronic mail artists established local as well as global networks. Early on, feminist activists and artists discovered the Internet as a new tool with both subversive and supportive potential for women. Although access to computers and the Internet is still limited, the Internet can be particularly important for geographically and socially isolated women who would not have access to empowering information and supportive environments otherwise. Many international cyber-feminist networks and informative sites concerning women have emerged, filling Woolf’s quote with an up-to-date dimension. New achievements in communication technology have been crucial to the development and success of Women Beyond Borders. Indeed, teaching women to communicate via the Internet has been an intrinsic aspect of the project from the beginning. Digital artist and Women Beyond Borders participant Victoria Vesna established the Internet link f-e-mail and beyond, designed to assist women in becoming knowledgeable about digital technology as a communicative tool. Further, in order to make the project more widely accessible, Santa Barbara artist Sky Bergman created a website with images of the boxes, exhibition dates, links to related projects, and other information about Women Beyond borders. In order to expand access, websites about Women Beyond Borders exhibitions and related projects abroad have been created by the Austrian, Japanese, and Australian project coordinators.

Taking advantage of modern technology and a general movement towards globalization, the project has successfully transcended borders of all kinds and built a community of women, who, through their involvement with this project, have become advocates for women’s creative visions and social change. Women Beyond Borders has developed into one of the most intriguing and inspiring cultural phenomena at the arrival of the 21st century. While the shape of the box may symbolize containment to some, and was critically approached by several participants, its broader framework challenges existing norms and limits.

The text accompanying a box by a Women Beyond Borders participant in Singapore adroitly summarizes the complexities of this project: “I have gathered a few women and men from my community to witness a cremation of this box, after which the ashes were placed in a custom-made, cut-glass replica of the box. Death to borders…of course the glass box and its walls are practically a vitrine—to enshrine the diminishing of all borders that divide us.”

Sania Papa Ph.D., Director of the Thessaloniki Center of Contemporary Art – GREECE – 1996

Twelve Greek women artists of different generations are participating in this unique exhibition of Women Beyond Borders, a symbolic journey enclosing and dispersing at the same time the transcultural memory of a polysemic past-present. The boxes reveal a multitude of transformations: ambiguous, tragic, enigmatic, subversive, astonishing, tender. They offer different levels of meaning and interpretation: physical, intellectual, emotional. The Greek participants follow the laws and principles of the esoteric harmony of their logos. They become the “hermeneutes” of their individual histories, which arise from their relevant motherland and tradition.
 
During the present period of political, social, and cultural disharmony and the domination of the mass media, a characteristic homogeneity establishes a norm for all forms of human communication, thus destroying the meaning of duration, interior time, and authenticity in works of art. This effete eclecticism creates a misleading spiritual euphoria, based on the repetition, the fake, the feigned and the substitute.
 
WBB reinforces the dire need for a truthful and authentic communication, which will reveal the importance and power of a spiritually rejuvenated plane of human relationship among the members of world-wide family of art.
 
The Greek artists participants are expatriates and scattered, living in a variety of different countries (Greece, USA, France, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain) independent of their spiritual hinterland, their own individual forms of visual expression. They select the road of intellectual homelessness with return journeys to their homeland and continuous links with the international art scene. These individual histories which arise form the relevant motherlands, traditions of expression and contradictory cultural frameworks, will be interpreted here as individual entities.

Jenny Marketou is an interdisciplinary artist, born in Athens. She lives in New York, teaches at Cooper Union School of Art and The New School for Social Research in New York. In the mid 90’s, she immerses in new media and Internet technologies as new domain to create art. Her work addresses complexities and contradictions, uncertainty, discomfort and anxiety which corresponds to the fluid, transversal ideas created by new subjectivities, biological manipulation, surveillance, virtual spaces, networks and speed. In her work entitled Amazons of the Next Millennium, the painted box is filled with a series of women’s names (200) of all nationalities from antiquity to the present, printed in different colors on white paper tags. The open box, as she explains, is a symbol of the Amazon warriors who lived and fought together in a migratory way of life during the golden age. Filled with names of women we know, we read, we are of, we want to be, signifies the power, the importance, the influence and the voice we women could achieve working together, for our rights against violence and discrimination at the beginning of the next millennium.

Lydia Venieri, artist of the 90s studied and lived in Paris from 1982 until 1995. Her work, ancient-future, apocryphal and enigmatic, transcends both past and future to reveal the ever flowing continuity of the Eternal Present. The artist narrates and interprets the history and behavior of matter in the quest of realization of its shapes, its formulation. Working the amorphous, shapeless mass of raw lava as an organ of memory, interprets and manifests their hidden qualities. She steals the energy of the material in order to reconstitute it. The ideas and concepts as the energized particles of the spiritual logos, present a new order in the field of sculpture seeking for primary forms. As a sacred place of comparison and relationship, her work, polytheistic and transcultural concerns the analogy between the matter and the anti-matter, the primary (immaterial) lava and the (embodied) clay. She achieves to interconnect, unify and amalgamate in an almost alchemical manner the opposing natures of materials and combine them amicably. The power of attraction is unified with the principle of struggle and strife. Pandora’s Bomb represents the beauty of Nature liberated from the destructive dowry of Authority. Memory loves and saves Beauty form the destructive megalomania of Authority. Due to this, Authority attacks Memory. By trafficking in Memory, the artist smuggles Pandora’s bomb with the belief that Beauty disarms Authority.

The Work, Knitting Machine For a Woolen Cord by Thalia Chioti, artist of the 90s, is full of allusions to the female element, mythology and cord craft. Wood thread is the main material of her knitted sculptures. The box contains a small knitting machine and a small bobbin of wool thread. It’s traditional, an old way of making a cord, and anybody can go on knitting this cord. It is like a trip. A memory. But the tip of the thread must remain in the box.

In her need to grasp and arrest lost time, Chryssa Romanos, artist of the 60s transforms her thought into motion. She selects and puts together parts of maps of favorite cities she has already traversed or has yet to discover, producing narrative, emotional labyrinths, always reversible and with specific or non-definable areas. The artist changes the name of her maps into Labyrinths, thereby altering irrevocably the dialectic between form and content. The intersections of routes on Chryssa’s Map/Labyrinths describe a specific area where the ways of the polymorphous shapes, the graphs of time and space get tangled into trapped desires. The artist breaks the conventional rules of perception and interpretation of visible objects and the relation between form and content and proposes a personal way of interconnection and interaction between pictorial and verbal elements. She conceals and at the same time exposes on the watery, chaotic substratum of Plexiglas the very act of painting, the etched on transparency infinity. The transparent surface rescues the visibility of the images. Map/Labyrinth, Romanos encloses into a Plexiglas box with the characteristic disparate forms of the declare process, the wooden box, painted in white. This symbolic act of locking and protecting, revealing through transparency at the same time, corresponds to the most precious and humanistic sentiment, which is hope.

Aphrodite Litti, artist of the 80’s, imposes the question of preservation and survival of the creation of natural models and their influence on the world of sculptural forms. In the era where the technology, genetic and government evolution based on the infinite alternations of the personal or mass reality, increase their definitions and interpretations. Her sculpture, in three-dimensional habituated expansions are determined as big support of the monumental nature, who is removed and transported to the space of civilization. She tries to join the nature’s undeclared and native nature with the civilization’s clear and simulate, the nature reproduction with the dissimulation of the artificial nature reproduction of ideas, forms, organisms. She elaborates mainly, traditional resisting materials, basic production materials (iron, mortar, plaster, mosaic, grits, glass, stone, mirror) and uses hand made elaboration’s ways (modeling of clay, construction of molds, oxy-acetylene welding). The Box-Bird and Branch incorporates ecological concerns by contrasting elements in order to suggest the interplay of human intervention in natural processes.

Lydia Dambassina was born in 1951 and lived in Paris for many years, processes and assembles materials or scavenged ready-made used objects (iron, plaster, wood, cowhide, feathers, wooden shoe trees, motors, etc.), the residual fragments of other hypothetical constructions along with structural arrangements and altered, combined transformations form different directions (constructional, combinative, sculptural, manually manipulated, crafted). In her work, two levels, another. The spiral is the symbol of life and fertility, of evolution.