What’s girlhood? This exhibition seeks the reply

GIRLS: On Boredom, Rebellion and Being In-Between gathers a long time of photographs, recollections, from Jim Britt’s iconic Sisters to modern reflections on the rituals of rising up

First printed in People journal in 1984 – later resurfacing in a Comme des Garçons marketing campaign for AW88 – Jim Britt’s Sisters is an excellent show of girlhood. Shot on the photographer’s residence in Los Angeles in 1976, his daughters Melendy (Mimi) and Jody radiate with a selected sort of pleasure that befits their close to adolescence; they put on brilliant, laughing smiles that exhibit their braces, and correlating moon and rainbow jewelry round their necks. “It was for fun,” shares Britt, “I had no agenda other than that, but these photos seem to have since touched so many people.” In 2018 the prolonged collection was printed as a e-book (accompanied by a double-sided poster), whereas extra not too long ago Sisters has been adopted by MoMu in Antwerp, the place an image of the ladies playfully sticking their tongues out at each other broadcasts the exhibition, GIRLS: On Boredom, Rebellion, and Being In-Between.

Curated by Elisa De Wyngaert, GIRLS is a tenderly articulated survey of the methods girlhood has and continues to be interpreted – each as a approach of seeing and as a car for shaping visible tradition – exploring particularly how the realms of vogue, artwork, movie and pictures have thought-about, utilized, and generally interrogated, concepts sometimes in step with the aesthetic language of girlhood. Works by Simone Rocha, Alice Neel, Molly Goddard and Frida Orupabo characteristic, circumnavigating three core bed room installations (the primary with costumes from Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, the latter two collaborations with Jenny Fax and Chopova Lowena); Claire Marie Healy, moreover, has curated ‘Girls in Film’, a montage of clips that study how clothes operates in cinema as a way of self-expression.

“For many women artists and designers, adolescence has always been central to their work and continues to shape how they see and understand the world. And photography, because of its immediacy, can capture a sense of intimacy and awkwardness – that mix of playfulness, spontaneity, and self-awareness – in a way that slower media can’t,” gives De Wyngaert in an e mail. “I wanted then, to include photographers from different generations who have shaped how girlhood is portrayed. Nuanced and unique visions of girlhood; work that never treats girls as objects but approaches them with respect, often co-created or shaped by the teenager’s personal boundaries and agency.”