The YES! Association
The YES! Association is an artist group that operates in Sweden, Germany and the USA to promote a more heterogeneous and more equal art scene.
Link to the YES! Association >>
As part of our participation in THE MODERNA EXHIBITION 2010 we made an intervention within ONE-DAY SEMINAR ON FEMINIST STRATEGIES AND METHODS, October 23, 2010 organized by Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Our work We Will Open a New Front – lecture by Lee H. Jones was performed during the symposium in the afternoon where Diana Mulinari, Lawen Mohtadi and Tiina Rosenberg also gave a lecture each.
You can watch the video documentation of the performance We Will Open a New Front – lecture by Lee H. Jones, here:
Plentiful are you who have inspired us when writing the lecture, we thank you all and we especially want to thank Lea Robinson who performed as Lee H. Jones with such vigour and commitment!
BACKGROUND the YES! Association:
The YES! Association was founded in 2005 by Malin Arnell, Johanna Gustavsson, Line S Karlström, Anna Linder and Fia-Stina Sandlund in connection with the exhibition Art Feminism – Strategies and Consequences in Sweden from the 1970s to the Present. At the exhibition opening, the YES! Association performed the work Press Conference/Performance in which they presented gender-separated statistics for the institutions responsible for the exhibition. Towards the end of the press conference, the institutions were invited to sign the YES! Association’s Equality Agreement. All institutions declined unanimously.
Today, the YES! Association is run primarily by Åsa Elzén, Johanna Gustavsson and Malin Arnell, with provisional project committees. The agreement has been reformulated and renegotiated and now exists in several versions, all aimed at promoting social diversity in the field of art.
In their works the YES! Association explores fiction, enactments and performance. Recently they have taken Augusto Boal’s forum theatre as a starting point, using fiction as a preparation for the future. One of the fundamental concepts is to rehearse a certain situation, and thereby gaining experience and skills that can be applied in a future “real-life” situation. The activities of the YES! Association focus on issues relating to how we can name and use identity categories (sex/gender, ethnicity/”race”, sexuality and class) for the purpose of emancipation, without reproducing the prevailing discriminatory power structures yet again.
YES! is an association that aims to create favorable conditions for art workers whose practices and activities contribute to the overthrowing of male supremacy, ethnical supremacy and of hierarchies connected to physical and mental ability, sexuality and class.
YES! is a separatist association for art workers whose practices and activities are informed by feminism with an intersectional perspective.
YES!'s goal is to overthrow the ruling system of patriarchal, racist and capitalist power structures by putting into practice a structural redistribution of the access to financial resources, space and time within the art scene.
YES! - Equal Opportunities Agreement
