Feminist Avant-Garde Exhibition from Verbund Collection Debuts in Brazil

The exhibition 'Insurgencies – Feminist Avanguard of the 1970s: Works from the Verbund Collection, Vienna' opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) in São Paulo on March 28, 2026. This marks the first European tour stop for this collection outside Europe. The show features approximately 70 works by 30 artists, focusing on feminist art production from 1970s Austria while including creators from Italy, Japan, Poland, and the United States. Curated by Gabriele Schor, the exhibition is organized around five thematic sections: 'Wife/Mother/Housewife,' 'Imprisonment/Liberation,' 'Beauty Dictates/Female Body,' 'Female Sexuality,' and 'Identity/Games of Representation.' The Verbund Collection, established in 2004 by Europe's leading hydroelectric producer, has built a significant archive on feminist art and has been organizing traveling exhibitions since 2010. The MAC presentation creates dialogue between the visiting collection and the host museum's holdings, with each section including a work from MAC's collection. Notable artists include VALIE EXPORT, Renate Bertlmann, Florentina Pakosta, Ulrike Rosenbach, and Jana Želibská. The exhibition highlights how these artists used avant-garde techniques—video, photography, performance—to challenge patriarchal structures, gender stereotypes, and social control over women's bodies. According to curator Ana Magalhães, the 1970s context in many countries involved authoritarian regimes where control over women paralleled broader political repression. The show expands Brazil's ongoing reexamination of art history through gender perspectives, introducing rarely seen Austrian and Eastern European feminist avant-garde work to local audiences.