POST PHOTOGRAPHY
The photographic work of María María Acha-Kutscher subtly revisits a central nucleus of conventionalisms linked to the feminine and femininity. Her research is silent, not strident, she dedicates herself to a meticulous collection of images taken from various sources (old books, posters, advertisements, albums, magazines, Internet…) which she then organizes on her computer by categories. Her digital collages are born from that living archive where the concepts to be reexamined are in constant circulation. It is relevant to note that her growth and maturity as an artist develops in parallel to the confluence of two global situations that we have experienced in recent decades, especially since 2005. On one hand, the advances of the feminist movement generated by the fourth wave; on the other, the consolidation of the Internet, social networks and smartphones. These two transcendental circumstances, one linked to women’s equality and the other to the way in which we relate to images today, determine a new era where it is necessary to ask ourselves about the construction of our cultural identity to understand where we come from and where we are going as a society. Its positioning reconfigures clichés to put us in front of the mirror of apparently innocuous visual messages that we take for granted. In fact, her work enhances a slow-processing intelligence that has nothing to do with the despotism to which the daily gaze of scrolling, as fast as it is empty, subjects us.»
– Sema D’Acosta
Reimagining Aging
2023-
«Esta colección de imágenes reapropiadas sirve a Acha-Kutscher como metáfora del paso del tiempo. La reivindicación feminista que viene a realizar con la potente plasticidad que deja la impronta de la rabia vivida de manera vicaria (la rabia con la que se arranca una imagen publicitaria que no nos representa), tiene que ver, concretamente con su ‘investigación sobre el imaginario del envejecimiento femenino en la historia del arte, la publicidad y el cómic’»
-Elena Pedrosa
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Womankind
2010-
«Her working method consists of resignifying several archive images from highly different sources and then introducing subtle formal changes into these. Accordingly, as in Agnès Varda’s cinematographic fable, it could be argued that María María Acha-Kutscher has become a “gleaner” of the detritus ingested by this male, heterosexual, white cultural hegemony that created the visual, literary and public stereotypes of women between the late 19th and early 20th centuries.»
– Valentín Roma
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FEMINISM AND ACTIVISM
Indignadas
2012-
«Since 2012, María María Acha-Kutscher´s continuous exercise of research, representation, and visibility of women within different manifestations is a true declaration of intent. The artist has created hundreds of drawings that illustrate the strength feminism has gained globally over the last decade. Turning these anonymous people into protagonists who fill the streets in protests such as 15-M, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, or from feminist collectives like Femen, SlutWalk (March of the Whores), #MeToo, or Ni Una Menos, is a feminist act in itself to show the strength of activism around the world.
– Semíramis González
There is no planet B
2024-
This installation brings together an extensive selection of drawings on which the artist has worked in recent years, focused on actions against the climate crisis worldwide. The aim of this installation is to amplify the voices of grassroots collectives and movements -like Friday for Future and Extinction Rebellion, among others-, that are working in defense of nature and biodiversity
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NEW
Llapanchik
2025-
Coming soon
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
Irmgard. Ein Alphabet des Gedenkens
2021-
This project is a tribute to my grandparent’s memory and has a dimension of historical reparation for the victims of the National Socialist regime in Germany, as well as for the patriarchal structures prevailing in our societies.
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Todas mis sangres
2023-
«Photography allowed the transformation of family life into a visual account, which took the form of a family album lovingly looked after and updated by women. This is precisely what María María Acha-Kutscher does in this work, Todas mis sangres.»
– Carlos Jiménez
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INSTITUTIONAL APPROPRIATION
Herstorymuseum
2017
«From the early modernist vanguard of the 20th century, artists have adopted all kinds of strategies to escape from the dynamics above, or at least to highlight and question them. The creation of new institutions is one of the most powerful ever conceived (…) What these artists have found is that the museum, context for transformation of material objects into art, can be superseded, falsified and forced to confront itself. Conceiving works that are simultaneously museums overturns the existing order of things. It is no longer the museum that legitimises creation, but the creative act that gives rise to the museum.»
– Tomás Ruiz-Rivas, Museo de Artistas
María María Acha-Kutscher 