Feminine Fragility Exhibition

Exhibition Essay

In Feminine Fragility, artists Kamila Waleszkiewicz and Iwona Van Niekerk present a profoundly resonant exhibition that invites reflection on violence, remembrance, healing, and feminine resilience. Hosted at the Moores Building Art Space in Fremantle, this collaborative project transforms the gallery into a sanctuary for contemplation and testimony, where art resists, mourns, and remembers.

At the heart of the exhibition is Waleszkiewicz’s large-scale installation of 50 sheer fabric panels, each imprinted with the ghostly outline of a dress. These represent the 50 women killed by intimate partners or family members in Australia in 2024. Floating gently in the gallery space, these transparent textiles evoke absence and memory, becoming vessels of lives lost too soon. They are intimate symbols, life-sized, delicate, and powerful, signifying not just death, but the energy, dreams, and humanity of each woman memorialised.

This exhibition holds to the belief that art as resistance does not require confrontation. It can be a quiet, deliberate refusal to accept the cultural systems that erase women, reduce them to numbers, or dismiss their suffering. In this work, absence becomes a voice, and silence becomes a statement.

Waleszkiewicz’s experimental video works, Impersonality and Muffled Scream, bring together performance, original piano improvisation, and archival text to explore collective grief and the emotional toll of gendered violence. The works draw from feminist video pioneers such as Valie Export, Ana Mendieta, Joan Jonas, and structural filmmaker Peter Kubelka. Her use of distortion, fragmentation, and poetic rhythm renders the statistics drawn from Counting Dead Women Australia into visceral, haunting meditations on the fragility and erasure of women’s lives.

Iwona Van Niekerk, as co-lead artist, contributes works that explore internal landscapes, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Her practice centres on layered meanings and the often-unspoken power of feminine presence. Her works in the show echo the exhibition’s central messages with depth and clarity.

The exhibition also includes contributions from members of Art Conversations WA: Andy Druyan, Anita Grewal, Graham Hay, Kelly Ha, Eimear Flynn, Ivana Girard, and Jane Marron, each presenting a single work in response to the exhibition’s core themes. Their pieces, in a range of media, collectively extend the conversation about fragility, identity, and care.

Jana Vodesil-Baruffi, a special guest artist, presents emotionally charged figurative works that explore transformation, vulnerability, and feminine strength. Her paintings stand as testaments to the complexity of female identity and experience, bringing a vital voice to this visual dialogue.

The opening night features a poetry reading by actress, filmmaker, and poet Isabella Jacqueline, who will share a poem from her collection Shattered, drawn from lived experience and feminist consciousness.

Monika Lukowska’s voice adds to the exhibition’s artistic significance, bridging practice and theory through her expertise as both a printmaker and academic. Her research into memory, materiality, and the poetics of place resonates with the exhibition’s exploration of presence, absence, and embodied experience. As a guest speaker at the opening night, her reflections help contextualise Feminine Fragility within the broader discourse of contemporary printmaking and feminist art practice, enriching the audience’s understanding of how visual language can act as both archive and resistance.

As part of the exhibition program, Feminine Fragility will host a public discussion panel on Friday 20 June, 6–8 PM, bringing together leading voices in advocacy, counselling, and women's safety. Moderated by Kamila Waleszkiewicz, the panel will feature Sheree Schonian, award-winning author, counsellor, and Agent for Change at the Department of Communities, and Alison Evans from the Centre for Women’s Safety and Wellbeing. The discussion will focus on recognising red flags in relationships, systemic support tools available in WA, and the critical role of language and community in shifting public perception of gender-based violence. This event aims to transform awareness into action, offering both personal insight and practical resources in a space grounded in empathy, solidarity, and shared purpose. 

Feminine Fragility is a call to memory, a space for quiet protest, and an invitation to look deeply and listen closely. Through installation, print, painting, video, and voice, it reminds us that behind every statistic is a woman with dreams, laughter, pain, and potential. Art has the power to speak for those silenced, to hold space for grief, and to illuminate paths toward care and connection.