Panel from Let's Take Back Our Space: 'Female' and 'Male' Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures;Marianne Wex;1977;19 5/8 × 32 15/16" (49.8 × 83.7 cm);Gelatin silver prints, paper and ink on board;Committee on Photography Fund, and The Modern Women's Fund;© 2024 Marianne Wex

In 1972, the West German artist Marianne Wex began a visual survey of gendered body language. She picked up her camera and covertly photographed people in her hometown of Hamburg, observing how men and women were socialized to inhabit space differently. She also rephotographed pictures from advertisements, newspapers, magazines, film, television, and art catalogues, pasting the images onto boards organized into categories like “standing arms,” “sitting legs,” “lying down,” and “possessive holds.” For Wex, “these mostly unconscious actions” were “essential parts of our communication.”

Taking Back Our Space: Photographic Perspectives, presents eight artists who use the photographic medium to explore the relationship between bodies and space from intersectional feminist perspectives. The exhibition brings Marianne Wex’s 1977 feminist photographic project Let’s Take Back Our Space: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures, which MoMA acquired in its entirety in 2018, into dialogue with recent works by seven contemporary artists: Nona Faustine, Martine Gutierrez, K8 Hardy, Yuki Kihara, Joiri Minaya, Paulina Olowska, and Wendy Red Star. Each of these works is on view at MoMA for the first time.

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