More than forty years of reflecting on and discussing the boundaries and restrictions of sexual identity, standardizations and transgressions of physical appearance and mentally pre-configured constructions of social behavior have given rise to a plethora of artistic outputs on the theme of gender relations and its everyday perception. What initially began as a female concern—woman’s under- and misrepresentation within society and the need to break down a male-dominated system of thought and action—has increasingly seen a growth of male interest, first primarily from the gay scene and later at the mainstream level through a heightened awareness for visuality and media representation.
Cutting Realities is an exhibition that links the historic year 1968 with contemporary approaches to issues of gender, demonstrating how artists articulate their concerns on a visual and performative level. The show exclusively presents works from Kontakt. The Art Collection of Erste Bank Group, a collection that focuses on art from Central and Eastern Europe. The artworks in the exhibition span a timeframe of almost 50 years, reflecting not only the beginnings of feminism and gender activism but also the current status of gendered lifestyles. On the fortieth anniversary of 1968, the show provides an insightful look at how attitudes toward physicality and sexuality have developed.
Regarding the issue of gender, which is not only related to the notion of womanhood, there are multiple ways to look at how individuals and their bodies perform within society. According to the Slovenian artist and theorist Marina Gržinić, there have been three stages of gender development since its beginnings in the 1960s. The late 1960s and the 1970s primarily saw a dramatization of femininity within a growing feminist environment, which was shifted into a queer context in the 1980s. Lastly, in the 1990s, there began a questioning of the roles of masculinity and femininity within both a hetero- and homosexual matrix. Around the mythical year 1968, with its radical student protests and sexually revolutionary ideas, the visual world started to become enriched by a variety of images involving bodily constellations and cross-gender relations, providing insight into private realms and body matters that society had heretofore kept hidden.
Cutting Realities combines works in which the body plays an important role in directly formulating individual concerns with more intricate works relating to the surroundings of gendered lifestyles in present-day society.

Mária Bartuszová, VALIE EXPORT, Tomislav Gotovac, Sanja Iveković, Šejla Kamerić, Běla Kolářová, KwieKulik, Denisa Lehocká, Ulrike Lienbacher, Natalia LL, Dorit Margreiter, Tanja Ostojić, Hans Scheirl, Kateřina Šedá, Artur Żmijewski/Katarzyna Kozyra