signs and symbols is delighted to present The Delicate Things That Girls Do, a group exhibition featuring artists Rachael Catharine Anderson, Sarah Anderson, Shaqayeq Arabi, Annabel Daou, Ornella Fieres, Karen Finley, Jeewi Lee, Rachel Libeskind, Linder, Pola Sieverding and Ann Weathersby.

Taking its title and inspiration from a pastel pink poster in Jenny Holzer's incisive series Inflammatory Essays (1979–1982), the exhibition brings together eleven women artists spanning multiple generations, nationalities and mediums of choice. Whether embracing, rejecting, ignoring or inverting the gendered expectations they face, each participant offers an answer to the question of what it means to be a woman, an artist and both at the same time.

A real torture would be to
Build a sparkling cage with
2-way mirrors and steel bars.
In there would be good-looking
And young girls who'd think
They're in a regular motel
Room so they'll take their
Clothes off and do the
Delicate things that girls do
When they're sure they're
Alone. Everyone who watches
Will go crazy because they
Won't be believing what they're
Seeing but they'll see the bars
And know they can't get in.
And, they'll be afraid to
Make a move because they don't
Want to scare the girls away
From doing the delicious
Things they're doing.

(Jenny Holzer, Untitled (A Real Torture Would…), from Inflammatory Essays, 1979–1982)

Rachael Catharine Anderson (b. 1990 Columbus, Ohio) is a 2022 MFA graduate from the Painting and Printmaking program in the Yale School of Art. She makes oil paintings that explore the aesthetic dimension between human and otherworldly interactions. Her work displays elements of enchantment and the surrealist dreamscape that follows in the legacy of artists such as Agnes Pelton, Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini. She focuses on the uncertainty, wonder and fascination that ecology and cycles of growth and decay inspire. In the fall of 2023, Anderson will have a solo exhibition at signs and symbols. Her work has previously been shown in Milan and the US including Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York. Her paintings are also included in major private collections in the US and Europe. She currently lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut.

Sarah Anderson engages in a broad interdisciplinary investigation integrating various media and research areas while remaining focused on sculpture as a specific field of inquiry. Her questions are negotiated through queerness as a mode of generative translation — a method of appropriating systems like minimalism and abstraction to tell stories about being a body that desires, destroys and is damaged. The work explores the violence and desire that flows between an internalized sense of self and its varied physical personas. The purpose is to make objects that point a viewer towards a more complicated subjective relationship to ‘things’ in the world through formal, spatial and narrative means. She holds a BFA in Glass from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. She has attended residencies internationally, including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Maine), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace (New York), A.I.R. (Brooklyn), KinoSaito Arts Center (New York), Mana Contemporary BSMT (Jersey City), La Escuelita (Nicaragua) and CanSerrat (Barcelona). Her work has been exhibited at galleries institutions such as LaMama Galleria, Abrons Art Center, The Wallach Gallery at Columbia University, Nurtureart, Helena Anrather Gallery, A.I.R, signs and symbols and Vox Populi. Anderson is a Brooklynbased artist.

Shaqayeq Arabi (b. 1974 Tehran, Iran) is a painter, sculptor and installation artist. She was born in Tehran and divides her time between her hometown, Dubai and New York City. Arabi’s work finds its point of departure in image, sound and smell, as well as the sensitivity of the surrounding environment. In sketching, composing and connecting accumulated fragments together, Arabi traces her reminiscences, creating a tangible and touchable reality out of the emotions and sensations. Arabi received her Bachelor in Graphic Design from Al-Zahra University, Tehran, a BFA from University of Valencinnes, France and an MFA from Sorbonne University, Paris. She has had exhibitions in the Middle East, North America and Europe — notably Roots, Total Arts, Dubai; Study of an Upturned Ziggurat, Dept. of Signs and Symbols, New York; and Bits And Pieces: Collages And Assemblages, Shirin Gallery, New York.

Annabel Daou’s (b. 1967 Beirut, Lebanon) work takes form in paper-based constructions, sound, performance and video. Daou suspends, carves out or records the language of daily life: from the ordinary or mundane to the intimately personal and urgently political. In her performance work she explores questions of trust, intimacy, cross-cultural exchange and the operations of power. Her work frequently evokes moments of rupture and chaos but with the tenuous possibility for repair. Daou was born and raised in Beirut and lives in New York. Daou’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including at The National Museum of Beirut; DG Kunstraum, Munich; Arter, Istanbul and Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede. Recent solo exhibitions include Declaration at Ulrich Museum of Art, Global Spotlight: Annabel Daou at Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington and Only If at signs and symbols, New York. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Flash Art, Artnews and Canvas Magazine. Public collections include The Baltimore Museum of Art; The Vehbi Koç Foundation, Istanbul; The Ulrich Museum of Art; The Warehouse, Dallas, The Morgan Library and The Yale University Art Gallery. Recent residencies include the Pollock-Krasner award at ISCP in New York and Haus Des Papiers in Berlin. In 2022, Daou's sound installation Declaration was on view at the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Kansas, after the Museum acquired the work for its permanent collection in 2021.

Ornella Fieres's (b. 1984 Frankfurt, Germany) work explores the hidden aspects of digital technologies. For her investigations she develops photography, video and sound techniques that forcefully merge analog and digital material. Fieres works with photographs and documentary film material from the turn of the 20th century — a time that was characterized by a fascination of occultism in combination with technology — and processes the found footage with experimental methods. Fieres uses self-built apparatuses, autonomous algorithms, tweaked software or artificial intelligence to create moments that carry lingering traces of the past and might be foreshadowing events in the future. Fieres's multimedia installations have been exhibited internationally at The Centre Pompidou in Paris, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Goethe Institut Toronto, Literaturhaus Berlin, NurtureArt Gallery New York, Kunstverein Speyer and Fotografie Forum Frankfurt. She has given lectures and presentations at Volksbühne Berlin, Haus am Lützowplatz Berlin, Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach and at New Lab New York, where she had a research residency in 2017. In the fall of 2024, Fieres will have her third solo exhibition at signs and symbols.

Karen Finley is an artist, performer and author. She is an interdisciplinary artist working in performance, visual art, sound, poetics, film and video, installation, public and social practice art. Born in Chicago, she received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her raw and transgressive performances have brought debate and controversy; Finley was the named plaintiff for the Supreme Court case Finley v. NEA that challenged the decency provision in government grants to artists through the National Endowment for the Arts. Her performances and visual art have been presented internationally such as at The Barbican in London, Lincoln Center, New York City, MOMA PS1 and the Bobino in Paris, amongst others. Finley is interested in freedom of expression concerns, social justice, visual culture, gender and sexuality, art education, metaphysics and lectures, and gives workshops widely. Her most recent work is a new performance Covid Anxiety Vortex Opera Kaleidoscope Kitty Disco (2023). She is the author of nine books, including her latest, Grabbing Pussy (OR Books 2018) and the 25th anniversary edition of Shock Treatment published by City Lights. A recipient of many awards and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Finley is an Arts Professor in Art and Public Policy at New York University.

Jeewi Lee (b. 1987 Seoul, South Korea) is a Berlin based artist whose multidisciplinary practice — spanning sites-pecific installations and interventions, video and image series — examines memory, time and decay. Important for her work are the performative marks and imprints of the every-day, collecting and preserving “the trace” as a pictorial element and recorded archive of lived social and historical events. She questions the sphere of visual perception through drawing attention to the unnoticed, the disregarded and the seemingly non-existent. While traces appear in abstract and minimal form, they contain indexicality and narrative elements; trace (physically and conceptually) exists as residues of past lives, recalling the passage of time; a visual allegory for lived experience — of history, place, memory and the body. Lee studied painting at the Berlin University of the Arts and at Hunter College University in New York. She graduated in 2014 as a master student in Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Berlin and held her MFA in 2018 in the postgraduate study Art in Context. She has received various grants and artist residencies, including Villa Romana Florenz, grant from the CAA, artist residency Thread from the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, artist residency in Jerusalem at Al Ma´mal Foundation and the scholarship from the Kunstfond Foundation. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Kunstverein Hamburg; Korean Embassy, Berlin; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; and Sculpturepark Schlossgut Schwante.

Rachel Libeskind (b. 1989 Milan, Italy) is a multidisciplinary artist whose research-based practice examines the construction of history and the enduring power of images. Working across collage, installation, video and performance, Libeskind appropriates and recontextualizes images in order to disrupt imposed boundaries — between the personal and public, ancient and contemporary, societal and cultural — and reveal unexpected parallels. Libeskind has presented solo exhibitions, installations and performances at Center for Jewish History, New York; Watermill Center, Long Island; Pioneer Works, Brooklyn; Bombay Beach Biennale; and Mana Contemporary, Miami. She has also been included in group exhibitions at institutions such as ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; Alabama Contemporary Art Center, Mobile; Baker Museum, Naples, Florida; Carpenter Center at Harvard University, Cambridge; and National Media Arts Festival of Lithuania, Vilnius. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships at Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, Kaneohe; The Watermill Center, Long Island; Long Road Projects, Jacksonville; and The Scuola di Grafica, Venice, Italy. She holds a B.A. with honors from Harvard University. In 2023, Libeskind was included in Phaidon Press's book Vitamin C+: Collage in Contemporary Art, the latest installment in the series of ‘Vitamin’ books. In 2024, Libeskind will be the subject of a solo exhibition at Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University, Alabama, which will coincide with her third solo exhibition at signs and symbols. Born in Milan and raised in Berlin, Libeskind is now based between New York and Germany.

Linder (b. 1954 Liverpool, UK) is a British artist who is internationally renowned for her photomontages, performances and radical feminism. Linder’s work has been exhibited widely, including recent solo exhibitions at Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK (2020); Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK (2020); Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, UK (2018); Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK (2018); Art On The Underground, London, UK (2018); Glasgow Women's Library, Glasgow, Scotland (2018); Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA (2013); Tate St. Ives, Cornwall, UK (2013); Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2007); and MoMA PS1, New York, NY (2007). In 2021, Linder was included in the Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, UK. Femme/objet, her comprehensive retrospective, traveled from the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France to the Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover, Germany (2013).

Pola Sieverding (b. 1981 Dusseldorf, Germany) is a visual artist working in the field of lensbased media. With photography, video and sound, she investigates the physical body as bearer of historical narratives that shape a contemporary discourse on the social body. By defining the body linguistically as an alternative to words, she exploits the classical ideal of the body as locus of pleasure and power. She is attracted to extremes and socialized emotions, something felt when the body switches between looking and being looked at, touching and being touched. Her images explore the body as an expressive element, the way we alter our behavior when we feel ourselves to be acting, a performance of just being. Sieverding studied at the University of the Arts Berlin, CMU Pittsburgh and Surikov Institute Moscow. She was a visiting lecturer to the Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah and an assistant professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich from 2016-2020. She has received a number of grants including a DAAD travel grant in 2008 and the Arbeitsstipendium by the Senat of Berlin in 2014. She has exhibited internationally at Art in General, New York; documenta 13, Kassel (with Natascha Sadr Haghighian); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (with Orson Sieverding); Lumiar Cité, Lisbon; Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; Dubai Photo Exhibition, Dubai; NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; and MAK Museum für Angewandte und Gegenwartskunst, Vienna. Sieverding lives and works in Berlin.

Ann Weathersby is a multidisciplinary artist who investigates how experiences of gender and sexuality intersect with popular culture to generate intimate personal mythologies. She utilizes ephemera, photography, text, glass, textiles and collage to consider representation and the spectrum of memory, especially in relation to the powers of image culture, language and nostalgia. Her work has been exhibited at Anthology Film Archives, New York; Chicago Cultural Center; Clamp, New York; Echo Park Film Center, Los Angeles; F, Houston; Foley Gallery, New York; Fortnight Institute, New York; Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; and Winter Street Gallery, Edgartown. Her work has been featured most recently in Artforum, F Magazine, and Musée Magazine. She holds an MFA from Yale University.