ON THE POLITICS OF SPACE AND GENDER DYNAMICS: PHOTOGRAPHY AT MoMA

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) announces Taking Back Our Space: Photographic Perspectives, presenting eight artists who use the photographic medium to explore the relationship between bodies and space from intersectional feminist perspectives. On view from September 20, 2026, this exhibition brings Marianne Wex's (Hamburg, Germany, 1937) 1977 feminist photographic project Let's Take Back Our Space: 'Female' and 'Male' Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures —which MoMA acquired in its entirety in 2018— into dialogue with recent works by seven contemporary artists: Nona Faustine, Martine Gutierrez, K8 Hardy, Yuki Kihara, Joiri Minaya, Paulina Olowska, and Wendy Red Star. 

From 1972 to 1977, Wex photographed the bodily postures of women and men on the streets of Hamburg, paying close attention to the specific positions of their arms, legs, feet, hands, and heads. She also rephotographed advertisements, fashion magazines, newspapers, studio portraits, pornography, film and television stills, and a world history catalogue of figurative sculpture. Influenced by the era's defining feminist activism and efforts toward collective consciousness-raising, Wex separated these images by gender and organized them into categories such as "Standing Arms," "Seated Legs," and "Possessive Holds," revealing how women and men had been socialized to inhabit space differently.

To create Let's Take Back Our Space: 'Female' and 'Male' Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures, Wex mounted thousands of gelatin silver prints and accompanying textual analysis onto nearly 250 boards, which she arranged into sequences that reflect the long impact of patriarchy on bodily expression in the West.

"Wex's pedagogical survey of gendered body language in everyday life is exceptional on several counts: it combines the history of social documentary, street photography, with the typologies of Conceptual art and the anti-relational potential of photomontage; it brings classical sculpture into dialogue with contemporary life to expose gender norms perceptible in the everyday; and it is an epic visual archive, a feminist version of such art-historical touchstones of cataloging and typology as Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas. Its project of identifying and unlearning prejudicial forms is as relevant as ever in the 21st century," said Roxana Marcoci, Acting Chief Curator of Photography and the David Dechman Senior Curator, who organized the show with Caitlin Ryan, Assistant Curator, Department of Photography.

The gallery space will also contain works, all from MoMA's collection, by contemporary artists who consider the intersections of race and gender beyond the binary. Within this context, the artist's notion of "taking back space" engages crucial questions of sovereignty and decolonization, resonating both as a reclamation of physical territory and the ability to represent oneself.

Mutually inflecting one another, these works offer a new critical lens through which to reimagine Wex's watershed installation. The exhibition will be accompanied by an artist-centric, lushly illustrated volume edited by Marcoci and Ryan. Featuring a never-before-published interview with Wex, who passed away in 2020, by Roxana Marcoci and Madeline Weisburg, the publication also includes brand new conversations between each contemporary artist and a scholar or curator, including Kaitlin Booher, Sophie Cavoulacos, Stuart Comer, Nisa Mackie, Joseph Pierce, Caitlin Ryan, and Lanka Tattersall, whose interview with Faustine took place prior to the artist's premature passing in 2025.

Taking Back Our Space: Photographic Perspectives will be on view from September 20, 2026, to Spring 2027, at MoMA, 11 West 53 Street, New York, New York, United States.