The choreography was about digging into the physical memories of these women’s tension, their rage, their sorrow. I tried to honestly remember my feelings and the emotional journey I went through in their presence. I am not trying to reproduce rape; I want to cut through the trauma so that people can receive and understand these experiences. The body speaks when testimony has been suspended.

My work's an attempt to challenge notions about nudity in a public space and how the body is represented in our culture.

Women artists need to consider the basic attitudes underlying censorship of women's art work and how it reflects a deep-seated fear in the community. During the past 15 years feminist artists have worked to change patriarchal attitudes towards women. As well, feminist art historians and critics have re-instated many women artists lost in history and made their imagery visible again. The struggle to produce new imagery and to interpret and defend such statements and ideas has often been at considerable personal cost.

di bavegung, "the movement," has pushed, encouraged, and given me space, like it has to many women who lacked confidence in their skills and in the value of their perspectives. Above all, it challenged me to present publicly what I discuss privately, to raise issues that I care about and that are central to my experience as a feminist and lesbian, as a Jew sorting out my identity and my relationship to Jewish history, as an American Jew defining my relationship to events in the Middle East.

Through the themes of the body, sexuality, self-representation, motherhood, beliefs, the exhibition questions how the question of intimacy in black women reveals unspoken words and manifests their relationship to the world. It offers a reflection where the notions of memory, family, spirituality and imagination are intertwined. The creations presented - painting, pottery, photography, video, performance, embroidery etc. - celebrate the emancipatory energy of the "power of their hands".

Each body has its art...

I was a follower of the historical feminist movement in Hungary and of the liberating force of the new dance movement which developed within its artistic context, and which I named “free dance”.

There was a strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform, the image that I came to call the feminine mystique.

[I had] pushed through to a spiritual sex: art--that nobody protects as readily as a charming love body of flesh.

The relationship of feminism to my work and the evolution of the form of my music are in violent flux.

[What relationship do you have with your body, as a young woman who also uses it as an artistic tool?] I was skinny and hiding in a large sweatshirt so as not to show it. My mother was worried: If you don't eat, stings. Maybe it was true. Then I learned to care for it, caress it, I discovered its movement, strength, falls, shooting, but above all uniqueness. If you think about it, flaws aren't really flaws. Freckles are cool, cool is the dot on your forehead, even the birthmark so visible on your nose, do not correct the space that opens your teeth, it is only yours, maybe you should treat it as a rarity and think that in reality you are a ' artwork.

Part of the task, of course, is simply insisting that female experience is human experience and worthy of being explored in literature. Before the women’s poetry movement, topics such as pregnancy and childbirth, mother-child relationships, sex, love, and marriage from a woman’s point of view, illness and aging from a woman’s point of view, were not considered “universal” enough for poetry. Ha ha ha. Women were silenced and condescended to when they wrote using the material of their own experience. But as Shostakovich said (speaking of Yevtoshenko’s Babi Yar poem mourning the massacre of the Jews of Kiev during World War II, defying the official cover-up), “Art destroys silence.” To bring what is silenced into speech is to make a space.

For me dancing is not just moving your arms and legs but basically it's a very spiritual experience. It's part of me and a second nature to me. You can say it is in my blood.

Both. I think it causes problems, but it's something we must work with, as the North American women did. They included everyone instead of being exclusive. They had so much energy, and they were going parallel to the women's movement. It's a very difficult time now in Australia. We don't want to identify with North America because Australian women have a very different experience. (reflecting on her experience living and working in North America versus Australia, and as a direct answer to the questions: How do you feel at the thought of having contact with women in a Women's Art Movement who are not feminists? Does that seem exciting, or do you see it as causing a lot of problems?)