In 2002, visual artist Kirsten Dufour (b. 1941), one of the first feminist artists in Denmark, initiated the video archive Let Us Speak Now. The project is both a video archive and an artwork addressing feminism, activism, and artistic production, based on interviews with international feminist artists. During travels and residencies—particularly in the United States—Dufour sought out feminist art communities with her video camera and a set of questions. These encounters developed into conversations that address a wide range of topics, with a primary focus on the intersection of feminism and activism.

The archive contains more than 80 interviews with key figures from the feminist art movement of the 1970s, the so-called second wave, as well as with younger generations of artists and activists working from feminist perspectives in which an intersectional approach—addressing gender in relation to race, class, and sexuality—figures prominently. The point of departure for the Let Us Speak Now archive was to investigate the feminist strategies that have developed over the years at the intersection of art and activism, and to discuss how these strategies form the foundation for the artists and their work. The archive presents an oral history of the feminist art movement from the 1970s up until 2007, when some of the final interviews were conducted. It brings together multiple generations of artists from around the world and offers insight into both the state of feminism at that time and key historical events within the movement.

HEIRLOOM has overseen the project management and coordination of the digitization of the archive, with support from Kilder til Dansk Kunsthistorie (Primary Sources in Danish Art History) under the New Carlsberg Foundation. The project has resulted in a public, digital platform through which source material has been made accessible. Let Us Speak Now is now becoming part of this archive (www.ktdk.dk). 

In connection with the public release of Let Us Speak Now, HEIRLOOM presents an exhibition highlighting this unique archive and artwork. The exhibition presents a selection from the archive, focusing on how practices from the feminist art movement of the 1970s resonate across displaced temporalities, connecting feminism to resistance to war, democratic participation, and the right to bodily autonomy. At the same time, the exhibition makes visible the repeated setbacks feminist agendas have faced. The exhibition includes a limited selection of works by visual artists featured in Let Us Speak Now. Some of these works are discussed in the interviews selected for the exhibition, in which the artists reflect on their creation and the necessity of making them. Other works relate more broadly to the exhibition’s thematic focal points.

The exhibition activates a selection of feminist artistic practices as a prism through which our present moment is reflected—a time in which vulnerable bodies are under immense pressure from political regimes and discrimination, and in which democratic practices are eroding. In this way, the Let Us Speak Now archive not only brings forgotten feminist practices into visibility, but also points toward feminist strategies for acting within and against the regimes we inhabit. Not as something to be simply repeated, but as a source of inspiration for new approaches.

Within this multifaceted archive, these practices appear as both distinct and interconnected. Listening and making space for each artist to articulate and show their practice was Kirsten Dufour’s guiding principle when interviewing other artists about their work—a feminist practice in itself. There is still a struggle to be fought for equality, and with this exhibition, HEIRLOOM seeks to create space for discussion and exchange around what feminism set in motion and how we move forward from here.

The exhibition is curated in collaboration with visual artist Pia Rönicke, who has archived Let Us Speak Now.

Andrea Geyer 
Manifest (2017/2026)  

The two banner works bearing the texts “I want a museum where you appear to me and I appear to you” and “I need a museum to remember everything” are part of Andrea Geyer’s long-term project Manifest. Executed in white nylon with silver foil–applied lettering, the banners appear both fragile and declarative—open statements suspended between desire and demand. 

Rather than speaking on behalf of the institution, Manifest turns its gaze toward the visitor. The statements articulate needs, expectations, and imaginaries of the museum as a relational space: a site of mutual visibility, memory, and responsibility. The work originates from Geyer’s research into the vision of Grace McCann Morley, the founding director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, who conceived the museum as a vital component of civic and democratic life—a place where art is inseparable from human experience, and where the banners were originally displayed on the façade. Geyer rewrites this historical ambition into contemporary declarations that encompass both personal desires and political positions. The banners function as quiet yet insistent invitations to rethink the museum as a space for community, resistance, and care in a time marked by social and political shifts. 

Group Material 
Archival material 

The archival material from Group Material, focusing on the exhibition Democracy (1988), testifies to the collective’s radical rethinking of the exhibition as a public and political space. Democracy was presented at the Dia Art Foundation in New York. Rather than presenting a finished artistic statement, Group Material conceived the exhibition as an open process, in which art, everyday objects, mass media, and audiences were engaged in an active negotiation of contemporary political reality. 

The exhibition was accompanied by a series of Town Hall Meetings—public, discursive gatherings in which artists, activists, theorists, and local citizens came together to discuss topics such as education, elections, race, AIDS, the economy, and the role of the media. These meetings extended the exhibition beyond its physical boundaries and insisted on dialogue, disagreement, and collective reflection as integral to the exhibition itself. 

In her interview in the Let Us Speak Now archive, visual artist, Group Material member, and archivist Julie Ault discusses the making of the exhibition. 

The archival material has been selected by Pia Rönicke and Johanne Løgstrup. 

Hale Tenger 
Beirut (2005–2007) 

In Beirut, Hale Tenger turns her attention to the spaces where traces of violence settle—often quietly, almost imperceptibly—into architectural surfaces. The video shows the façade of the hotel in front of which Lebanon’s former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was killed in a car bomb attack in 2005. Filmed covertly in a UN-guarded area, the footage captures a moment in which history seems suspended: white curtains flutter in the windows, and a contemplative soundscape creates a sense of calm. At the time of filming, a crater from the bomb was still visible on the other side of the building. Tenger allows this almost peaceful image to give way to sound and imagery that gradually reintroduce war into the field of vision—footage from Israel’s attacks on Lebanon in 2007 reverberates against the silent windows. 

In the loop, a recurring cycle of grief, forgetting, and renewed violence emerges, with the hotel façade bearing witness to the circularity of war. As in many of Tenger’s works, Beirut examines not only a geographical location but also a psychological state: human vulnerability in the face of power, uncontrollable events, and historical trauma that continually returns. 

Janet Olivia Henry 
Ana (2002) 

In Ana, Janet Olivia Henry creates a quiet yet insistent homage to the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta (1948–1985)—an artist whose practice revolved around the body, its traces, and its absence. Henry works with words as both form and meaning, allowing them to take physical shape in a tactile, beaded chain in which yarn, beads, threads are interwoven. 

Henry’s practice is characterized by a consistent use of everyday objects and playful materials, assembled into complex narratives about power, identity, and culture. By rendering large structural questions small and tangible, she opens a sensorial—and often humorous—approach to serious subjects. In Ana, humor recedes, making room for reflection, grief, and respect—a silent gesture that holds memory and connection in place. 

In her interview in the Let Us Speak Now archive, Henry speaks about the creation of the work. 

Joyce Kozloff 
Boys’ Art (2002–2003) 

In the collage series Boys’ Art, Joyce Kozloff investigates the images that shape childhood’s visual imagination—here, boys’ war scenes. Drawing on her brother’s childhood sketches and her son’s imaginative drawings, she juxtaposes these intimate archives with her own renderings of historical battlefield maps, tracing the early visual economy of masculinity across generations. The series began during a residency in the Italian coastal region of Liguria in the autumn of 2001. Isolated in her studio while the world outside was in a state of emergency following 9/11, Kozloff worked daily with military maps ranging from the Han Dynasty to the twentieth century, as a quiet, focused counterpoint to contemporary turmoil. 

Back in New York, she rediscovered six boxes of her son’s childhood drawings, which she scaled down and allowed to wander into her maps: small figures fighting, shouting, crashing, and bursting into her carefully composed monochrome grisaille drawings. In the encounter between her historical cartographies and her son’s cartoon universe, absurd, poetic, and tragic narratives emerge, as popular culture infiltrates the topographies of history. The series reflects on gender, inheritance, and global politics—and constitutes an unexpected collaboration between mother and son. 

In her interview in the Let Us Speak Now archive, Kozloff discusses the making of this work. 

Leslie Labowitz Starus 
Sproutime (2026) 

In Sproutime, Leslie Labowitz Starus unfolds a lifelong artistic practice in which ecology, feminist activism, and community grow together. The project spans more than four decades and began as an urban micro-farm in the artist’s own backyard—a site where she cultivated sprouts and greens as acts of resistance, self-sufficiency, and nourishment. Sproutime has evolved into both a social artwork and a practice encompassing agriculture, performance, education, and dialogue with local communities. 

Within this context, the banner Women Reclaim the Earth (1979/2026) plays a central role: a graphic, near-iconic call that travels through time and space, connecting early ecofeminist ideas about women’s relationship to nature with contemporary environmental and gender-political challenges. Sproutime reminds us that cultural change does not take place only through words, but through actions—planting, harvesting, sharing food, and standing together in collective hope for the earth and for life. Labowitz-Starus’ work demonstrates how ecological sustainability and feminist activism can function as both form and action in art. 

Maria Karlsson 
Paperwork / Put the Shame Where it Belongs (1989-2026) 

Maria Karlsson’s contribution to the exhibition consists of elements from earlier works that are reactivated in the present. Prints, drawings, copies, and photographs are assembled through repetition, regrouping, and serial arrangements, forming an open visual field. With the title Paperwork, emphasis is placed on “work,” pointing toward power relations and hierarchies. The paper works can be read as traces of processes: attempts and provisional states, notes and archives in which work is not completed but kept in motion. 

Karlsson’s practice is grounded in encounters, conversations, and actions rather than finished objects. Here, work is understood as producing not only outcomes, but also relations, hierarchies, and responsibilities. Later in the spring and during the summer, Karlsson will invite participants to one or more gatherings centered on art, activism, and archiving. In this way, the work expands from the visual into the social, and the exhibition becomes a space for shared reflection, exchange, and action—extending her relational and activist approach to art. 

Martha Rosler 
Fascination with the [Game of the] Exploding [Historical] Hollow Leg (1983) 

The video Fascination with the [Game of the] Exploding [Historical] Hollow Leg is a central work within Martha Rosler’s ongoing investigation of war, media, and public consciousness. The video juxtaposes images, text, and sound in a fragmented narrative that mirrors the ways military power and historical violence are often conveyed: through technical language, strategic maps, and abstracted systems in which human consequences are absent. 

Rosler employs repetition, looping, and collage to create an experience of distance and control—a war that appears as simulation, game, or information rather than lived reality.  

The video reveals how images and narratives of war circulate in the public sphere and shape our understanding, often without being actively challenged. Rather than functioning as documentation, the work operates as a critical intervention, exposing the ideological structures embedded in both image production and political language, and questioning how media fascination with war can obscure the reality of violence. 

Maryam Jafri 
(Dis)appearance Online (2021) 

In (Dis)appearance Online, Maryam Jafri examines how analog image archives from the past—here from Iraq, Syria, and Jordan—are mirrored in, or disappear from, today’s digital landscape. The internet functions as a vast and constantly expanding image archive: if an image is not online, it can almost seem as if it does not exist. At the same time, large amounts of visual information are deleted or obscured online—especially images from national archives. Jafri asks: what happens to these “banished” images? 

The work presents key historical images​,​ tracing their appearance, withdrawal, and absence online—across both commercial image databases and public archives. With this work, Jafri creates not only a visual documentation but also a commentary on loss, power, and memory in the digital age. (Dis)appearance Online reflects on ownership, identity, and the digital realm as a new archive, while sharply addressing how historical images can be marginalized, overlooked, or erased in the digital public sphere. 

Sharon Hayes 
President Chisholm (2020) 

President Chisholm takes its point of departure ​in​ Shirley Chisholm's presidential candidacy in 1972, historic due to her gender and Afro-American background —a moment when the future might briefly have taken a different form. The work revolves around what did not happen, yet nonetheless left lasting traces: ​t​he political and material changes inspired by Chisholm’s campaign, and the possibilities that can still be activated in the present. Through speculation, the unrealized becomes a tool for imagining the possible. 

The work was created in connection with Art for Philadelphia (2020), a collective fundraising initiative that emerged in response to opposition to police violence against Black communities. Here, President Chisholm formed part of a broader movement in which art functions as memory, action, and an investment in structural change. 

Kirsten Dufour (b. 1941) is a Danish visual artist. During her studies, she co-founded Kanonklubben (1968–70) and was active in an affiliated feminist artists’ group that produced some of the first major feminist manifestations in the 1970s, including the exhibition Damebilleder at Kunsthal Charlottenborg (1970). Since then, Dufour has remained committed to an artistic practice centered on collectivity, activism, and feminism—an approach that is unique within a Danish context. The boundaries of art and its potential for change have been explored through collaborations such as Tøj Til Afrika (1975–86), YNKB (Outer Nørrebro Cultural Bureau) (2007–12), and Astrid Noack’s Atelier (2009–). 

Andrea Geyer (b. 1971) is an artist living and working in New York. She creates text- and image-based works, often at the intersection of fiction and documentary. Geyer’s practice investigates specific social and political situations that address broader questions of national identity, gender, class, and collective memory. Geyer’s work is characterized by a sustained interest in institutions, historical narratives, and the ways cultural meaning is continually negotiated and rewritten. 

Group Material was a New York–based artist collective active from 1979 to 1996. Working in shifting constellations of artists, curators, and activists, the collective is known for its exhibition- and archive-based practices that challenged conventional hierarchies between art, audience, and institution. Visual artist Julie Ault was a core and continuous member and has since assembled and established the Group Material archive, now housed at the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University. 

Sharon Hayes is an American artist working with video, performance, sound, and public sculpture to examine the relationship between history, politics, and speech. Her practice dwells in the linguistic, affective, and sonic grammars through which political resistance takes shape, opening alternative readings of contemporary political conditions. Hayes’ work unfolds in dialog with collective actions and voices that challenge normative behaviors, fixed social contracts, and linear understandings of time. 

Janet Olivia Henry (b. 1947) is an American artist and educator living and working in New York. Her work addresses systemic issues such as race, gender, and power through humor, intimacy, and tactile strategies. She has been active in feminist and art-political contexts, including as a member of the Women’s Action Coalition (WAC), and has collaborated with filmmaker Linda Goode Bryant on the magazine Black Currant, which highlighted experimental artists associated with Just Above Midtown (JAM). 

Maryam Jafri (b. 1972) is an artist based in Copenhagen and New York. Working across video, photography, sculpture, and performance, she often employs research-based methods. Her practice operates in the tension between documentary and fiction, fragment and whole. Jafri’s work has been exhibited internationally and engages themes such as visual economies, historical archives, the culture of capitalism, and power relations embedded in images. 

Maria Karlsson was born in Sweden and lives and works in Denmark. Her practice operates at the intersection of art, social practice, and political engagement, investigating how art can function as a space for collective action and critical attention. She works with relational and process-based formats in which actions, meetings, and collective processes form the core of her practice. Karlsson previously lived and worked in Los Angeles, where she served as director of the Danish Arts Foundation’s exchange program for artists and curators. It was during Kirsten Dufour’s residency in this program that they first met, leading to several collaborations across art and activist groups. 

Joyce Kozloff (b. 1942) is a central figure in American feminist art and one of the leading artists associated with the Pattern & Decoration movement of the 1970s and early 1980s. She works with painting, collage, cartography, and installation, often combining decorative traditions with political and historical inquiry. Her practice examines global power structures through visual systems—particularly maps, archives, and ornament—interwoven with personal, intimate narratives. She lives and works in New York.

Leslie Labowitz Starus (b. 1946) is an American artist and urban grower living and working in Los Angeles. She began her career with feminist performances and collaborations in the 1970s before launching Sproutime in 1980—a life-art project that has unfolded over more than forty years. The project integrates ecofeminism, community, and hands-on engagement in sustainable food production with performance and social installation, challenging traditional distinctions between art and lived practice. 

Martha Rosler is an American conceptual artist based in New York. Working with photography, video, installation, performance, and text, her practice focuses on the public sphere—especially media, war, housing, architecture, and social inequality. Rosler documents and intervenes. Her work blends activism and critique, using art as a tool to expose ideological and structural power relations. 

Pia Rönicke (b. 1974) is a visual artist living and working in Copenhagen. Her practice centers on collecting, listening, and retelling stories that often remain unseen or unheard. Through spatial transformations, her works reactivate historical conditions in relation to everyday life. Working across film, print, sculpture, and text, Rönicke approaches the archive as a living, spatial, and relational practice, where historical traces are reactivated through encounters with daily life, landscapes, and collections. In her more recent work, she explores forests and plant migration as borderless, time-shifting phenomena, drawing connections to colonial and geopolitical structures embedded in botanical archives. 

Hale Tenger (b. 1960) is a Turkish artist whose practice addresses the shadow sides of civilization and modernity. Working primarily with video and installation, she explores migration, borders, discrimination, and the psychological effects of political violence. Her work is marked by a subtle, poetic sensibility that draws on political history without assuming a documentary position. She lives and works in Istanbul.