FEMALE GAZE 2025

The new edition presents an exhibition and performance program incorporating video, sound, and sculpture. In its second edition at Schinkel Pavillon, FEMALE GAZE once again invites choreographers to confront the male gaze and its associated traditional modes of perception with their contemporary perspectives.

At FEMALE GAZE, works are shown that, through a play of shifting perceptions, offer multiple readings and ways of looking while creating awareness of the space shared by performers and audiences.
The term “female gaze,” originally coined within the context of feminist film theory as a counterpoint to the male gaze, becomes a lens through which patriarchal assumptions and binary gender constructs are critically examined.

The artists explore themes such as the body and its representation, the micropolitical power of gestures, (voyeuristic) relationships of looking, and stereotypes, decoding visual codes and common attributions. The evolving nature of the female gaze is also addressed, showing how works can be reinterpreted over time and how the viewers’ perspectives can be integrated into the experience. All participating artists share a background in choreographic practice and work across disciplines, using experimental approaches to translate their ideas into performative forms.


Performance icons like La Ribot are featured alongside a younger generation of artists such as nasa4nasa, and new works by artists like Göksu Kunak will be presented.

All works at FEMALE GAZE 2025 will be shown in Germany for the first time.

Earlier works are presented alongside new ones, making the artistic developments of the participants visible. Curatorially, FEMALE GAZE spans a range of voices from internationally renowned artists to emerging discoveries, bringing together perspectives and influences from diverse contexts and countries including South America, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, and more.

FEMALE GAZE 2025 brings together a diversity of curatorial voices and opens a space for dialogue between them.


Cecilia Bengolea, (Argentina/France)
video/ installation from 22.–31.8.2025
Cecilia Bengolea (she/her), recipient of the Paris Critique Choreographic Revelation Award, explores communication through hybrid bodily imagery as a radical interruption of cultural patterns, drawing on Dancehall and Dub to engage with their social potential.
At FEMALE GAZE 2025, Bengolea’s video works will be shown for the first time in Germany. Previously exhibited at venues such as the Guggenheim Bilbao, her works are presented here through a curated selection of video screenings that juxtapose pieces from different time periods to reveal connections. One chapter from her latest video work Return to Bog Walk (adapted version) will be shown in Germany for the first time.

PERFORMANCE-PROGRAMME

FRI, 22.07.25, 7 PM
nasa4nasa, Egypt

Salma AbdelSalam (she/her), Noura Seif Hassanein (she/her), Hend El Balouty (she/her), Mona Gamil (she/her), Shaymaa Shoukry (she/her) Sound: Ismail Hosny At FEMALE GAZE 2025, the young dance duo nasa4nasa (Salma AbdelSalam, Noura Seif Hassanein) from Cairo will be presented in Germany with a work for multiple performers. Sham3dan is a transformation of collective presence, weight, and balance, in which synchronized movement becomes a silent act of resistance.

Influenced by the traditional Egyptian Shamadan dance, nasa4nasa interweave contemporary expression and address, among other themes, a colonial gaze. The choreography gradually breaks away from ceremonial rigidity and explores the deconstruction of narratives, bodies, and movement.
Sham3dan (Candelabra) is a variation of their performance shown at this year’s Unlimited Art Basel.
At FEMALE GAZE, nasa4nasa will, for the first time, take part in the performance hemselves.


SAT, 23.07.25, 6 PM
Lenio Kaklea (she/her), Greece/France
Lenio Kaklea, recipient of the Prix Fondation d’Entreprise Hermès, reflects in her work Untitled (Figures) on the act of “coming out” of protagonists from art history—both men and women—without having undergone a personal coming-out herself. She draws on references from painting, film, sculpture, Jean Genet, Jill Johnston, and the Greek painter Yannis Tsarouchis.


SAT, 23.07.25, 8:30 PM Premiere
Göksu Kunak (they/them), Turkey/Germany
In her new work Girl JOY, Göksu Kunak intertwines personal and (pop) cultural narratives. From Hollywood to Turkish soap operas, from Del Rey's melancholy to cinematic madness: In Girl JOY, they evoke the disturbed, the desirable, the tragic in a continuous flow of performances: monsters, psychotic lovers, icons, femmes fatales and soap opera ghosts. Somewhere between exorcism and excess, the piece focuses on crisis, collapse and glamour.


SUN, 24.08.2025, 4:30 PM
Catol Teixeira (they/them), Brazil/Switzerland
Catol Teixeira's work ODE is dedicated to gaps, breaks and transformations. It is a tribute to what does not happen, what never really solidifies. ODE thus becomes an exercise devoted to the unfinished.

SUN, 24.08.2025, 6 + 8 PM
La Ribot (she/her), Spain/Switzerland
Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for her lifetime achievement (2020), La Ribot will perform two pieces at FEMALE GAZE 2025. One will be a variation on one of her earliest works, the striptease Socorro! Gloria! (1991). It will be juxtaposed with a current performance that has only been presented once before.
In Pièce distinguée N°59 (2023), La Ribot, together with her male performance partner Juan Loriente, dissolves identifications in an archaic ritual. A fading of memories and history, between destruction and fusion in the sunset.


SUN, 24.08.2025, 6:30 PM
Ruth Childs (she/her) & Cécile Bouffard (she/her)
Ruth Childs, niece of postmodern pioneer Lucinda Childs and a representative of a new generation, presents Delicate People together with the sculptures of visual artist Cécile Bouffard—a series of shifting motifs and unsettling identities. The work also reflects Bouffard’s gaze on Ruth Childs, including sculptural fragments based on Childs’ body.

• Female Gaze is a format funded by the Capital Cultural Fund.