Thursday 9 January 2025, from 19:00 to 21:00

From girl dinners to girl math, the ‘girl’ dominates the internet – but how is she portrayed in museum collections? Join us on January 9th for the start of an ongoing collaboration between Young Stedelijk and LAB111, focusing on a different theme every edition. This first edition of Video Club has the theme Imagining Girlhood, featuring videos from the Stedelijk Museum’s collection. Let’s explore, discuss, and reimagine the figure of the girl! After the screening, host Kiriko Mechanicus will go into conversation with Martine Neddam, one of the artists, and Mela Miekus, curator-in-training at the Stedelijk Museum.

This edition of Video Club explores the experience of girlhood. As the Stedelijk has a large collection of feminist video works, the varied experiences of womanhood have taken center stage. However, the subject of girlhood has remained unexplored. “Girl” is a politically charged term. It can infantilize, but it can also be reclaimed to question patriarchal (male-dominated) norms. Recently, many girls have used the internet to share their experiences with girlhood, making this a popular discussion. Reflecting on themes of bodily autonomy, identity development, and gender expression, this screening sketches the complex map of girlhood.

About the artists

Martine Neddam (1953) is a French visual artist who has been working with internet virtual characters who lead an autonomous artistic existence in which the real author remained invisible. Mouchette is the virtual character and author at the origin of her series of online works. Videos, made by fans, are collected through this platform.

Barbara Visser (1966) is a Dutch visual conceptual artist, director, and documentary filmmaker. Visser is interested in existing images from different ages, questioning how, why, when and by who they are produced.

Dara Birnbaum (1946) is an American video and Installation artist. Birnbaum entered the field of video art in the mid-to-late 1970s challenging the gendered biases of the period and television’s growing presence within the American household.

Ansuya Blom (1956) is a Dutch artist that that focuses on the relation and friction between the marginalized individual and the external world within film or drawings. Words often play a big role in Ansuya Blom’s work.

Pipilotti Rist (1962) is a Swiss visual artist best known for creating experimental video art and installation art. She is known as a pioneer of spatial video art

Petra Cortright (1986) is an American artist working in video, painting, and digital media. Her videos playfully explore formal properties of video software and the representation of physical bodies in digital spaces.