Exhibitionistas: Notes on Contemporary Art and Life

What does the artist’s body do? No one pushes us to ask this more than the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta. Her excavated silhouettes in the landscape, where her body would at times lie, covered with petals or feathers, are but one of the actions and rituals that she performed during her short career. What did occur in her own body? Community? Communion? What was the origin and the purpose of her embodied art? And what is ...

We have great news! We're an Award Winning Podcast–Women Who Podcast award in the LGBTQIA+ category

Bonus Episode: Le Guin / Indigenous History / Lao Tzu / and more...

What was Ursula K. Le Guin's favourite book, and what did it uncover about the revered author's world-building and family legacy?

Did you enjoy the episode? Leave a small donation: https://buymeacoffee.com/exhibitionista

When she was a guest on the podcast, art Cur...

How and why do art and Summer join forces? Art, and visual arts especially, show imminent change–but so does Summer and its ideal of creative flow. How did–or did not–art speak of the climate emergency, gender policing, the war–in short, of loss? What role does this hot and luscious season play in the hubris of conquest, or the black hole of grief? Art curator and writer Joana P. R. Neves, our host, reminisc...

Writer Rachel Cusk asked: "Can a Woman who is an Artist Ever Just Be an Artist?" (NYT). Our host Joana, your favourite contemporary art writer and curator, turns this  question of gender and skill on its head: can men be (good) artists? Cusk's book "Parade" (2024) is this Art & Literature episode book of choice to tackle the issue. Can art and life be a continuous flow for female artists, as it seems to be for male ones?

Jo...

Art criticism is vanishing from mainstream media, but here's the uncomfortable question: does art and culture still need critics? Our host, Joana P. R. Neves, art curator and writer, examines why critics are leaving big outlets without being replaced—and what this means for art criticism, artistic quality assessment, curatorial etiquette, and the future of art evaluation itself. What is art criticism actually for? And where d...

AI is forcing us to define what being human is. So, did our host, an art curator and writer, dare to create a Manifesto? Awkward? Or are we not used to women proclaiming things? How can art–seemingly at the brink of commodification–bear new forms of being human? Or is does it spotlight you, art wanderer? The self-help book "Tiny Experiments " by Anne-Laure Le Cunff sparked this art question: why did it excite such a med...

As an art curator and writer, our host is often faced with printed or digital art portfolios – does this art digital hygiene go against art etiquette? Is art appreciation valid, or even possible through a copy of an art work? Through art images in a book? This issue hides a bigger one: how do you experience art if you live in a country far from the big museums and collections? Our host gets candid and starts with a personal a...

Art curator, writer and host Joana P. R. Neves, asks the ultimate art question of art questions: could art appreciation be a powerful combination of the analog and the digital? Even stranger: how does it hinge on the meaning of word "wonder" and "wander"? In a nutshell, are we in need of art digital hygiene? Is Art Wonderment the response to the decline of 20th century art criticism? As ever, Joana gets candid and exposes her own j...

Miniseries–Does obscurity lead to creative freedom? Why do I ask? Because of one sentence in American writer Chris Kraus' "I Love Dick" saying that once we accept obscurity, we can do what we want. Could this be the most daring feminist art statement? But then, why does it intersect with a cliché of sexual desire, the cowboy? Enter artists Sophie Calle, Hannah Wilke, intellectual Sylvère Lotringer, experimental art, the New Y...

Miniseries–There is a little discussed sub-plot in Proust's books: the narrator growing into art wonderment.  Joana unfolds this storyline about art and life: How can you spot artistic talent? To what extent the narrator's art anxiety and art appreciation abilities, first as a child, then a teen, and later a young adult are affected by his environment, the reluctance of his father and the enthusiasm of a fallen high soci...

Miniseries–Is there a dark side to creativity? Can the intersection of art and literature reveal it? Host Joana P. R. Neves, an art curator and writer, steps back from her job, and into the art questions it stimulates by digging into her favourite books: can art and technology have a balanced relationship? What effect do their outcomes have on us, the spectators? Will art and literature bring us a sobering reckoning? "The Inv...

Miniseries–Your host, writer and curator Joana P. R. Neves, invites you to read "The Mark on the Wall", a short and strange essay by the British writer Virginia Woolf. What prompts a meditative exploration, and how does it lead to art making? Is the creative flow gendered? Do female artists and writers have direct access to it? Is it possible for them to hold it, uninterrupted? 

Did you enjoy the episode? Think about supp...

What if writing and talking about contemporary art and life, art and literature, were two completely different things - but complementary? Instead of pitching them against each other, have we thought about articulating their qualities? Our host, art writer and curator, Joana P. R. Neves, tests this notion with a performance of sorts: reading one of her texts about the modernist writer Gertrude Stein without correcting her mistakes,...

How can a work of fiction influence the work of an artist? Can a visual arts practice be illuminated by storytelling? Are there art questions at the intersection between art and literature? Our host, art curator and writer Joana P. R. Neves, invites Bengali artist Laisul Hoque to choose an important book for his path into contemporary art. 

Did you enjoy the episode? Think about supporting Exhibitionistas by leaving a small don...

You're bound to get an art education with our guest, curator Sarah Carrington! Our art talk with her explores her work as director of the Public Art Trail in East London The Line, as well as the joys of producing visual arts projects and supporting artistic commissions for an urban space full of wildlife and industrial areas, away from the capital's most overcrowded areas.

Art Insider
is an art discussion segment with fa...

How do you overcome the extreme subjectivity of colour as a topic in art? María Castro Jímenez, pigment specialist and art historian, offers surprising new histories of colour. Can the study of colour reveal hidden pplitics of the past, present and perhaps the future of art? How do we go beyond the usual art explorations of perception? Or do they still have something to teach us? Why is colour taught conceptually and not as somethi...

What if a visual artist’s favourite tool revealed their creative process and philosophies? Even to themselves? This dual artist series inquires about contemporary artists’ studio practices. What are really artists working with today? What materials do they cherish? What other disciplines are they looking at? Cuban artist Ana María Caballero and British-Lebanese artist Alexandra Jabre answer these questions and reveal wh...

A part of our work and leisure is spent online and so is our art. Posted on social media and even made with the help of AI, LLMs, and more, creative initiatives and art objects may now also live in online art spaces. Is an art podcast to be confused with it? What are the joys and dangers of real art spaces becoming virtual ones? Or is the danger elsewhere, and the art education potentially everywhere? 

Art Topic is an art discu...

Have you ever been under the irresistible spell of an art work? 

Art Story is a shorter episode exploring an art work, an artist, an exhibition or even a concept through a proudly subjective narrative. 

Narrated by: the host, Joana P. R. Neves

Joana explores an aesthetic shock involving a tongue twister and a photography by Roni Horn in a busy art fair. Maybe you’ll jump into the flow, maybe you’ll be touched by ...