Citi's exhibition Feminine Power: From Divine to Demonic takes you on a journey spanning millennia through feminine spiritual beings. For the first time, sculptures, paintings, and dedicatory objects from ancient and medieval cultures around the world are displayed alongside modern and contemporary artworks to highlight the many ways in which female power and femininity have been viewed and celebrated throughout history.
The show highlights the many faces of feminine power – ferocious, beautiful, creative, or hell-bent – and its seismic influence throughout time, bringing together sculptures, holy artifacts, and artworks from the ancient world to today, and from six continents. It looks at how deities, goddesses, demons, saints, and other spiritual entities embody feminine power in various aspects of human life, from knowledge, passion, and nature to war, mercy, and justice.
The exhibition also examines how the portrayal of feminine power in world religion and mythology has shaped – and continues to shape – worldwide cultural attitudes toward women and gender identity through material culture.
Yet somehow, it felt like the exhibition had been hurriedly cobbled together from the various themes it had to offer. Rather than focusing on one thing, the exhibition covered a lot albeit in a broad and shallow way. The display was profuse with information with too much to take in and assimilate. That said, it was a really good introduction to a lot of female or feminized deities and demons that I hadn't heard of before.
I thought it explored the subject of femininity with regards to the divine, mystical, and mythical a bit more than it did anything else. There were plenty of artworks portraying feminine gods from as far back in history as 5000 years ago, to the relatively new and contemporary pieces. That in itself made it quite unique. It was also interspersed with quotes and quips from women who'd previously visited and shared what they thought about the artworks, and how they related to their spiritual experiences.
Despite coming across as thin and lacking in depth, it was definitely a one-of-a-kind event that offered a lot in terms of knowledge. It didn’t really come up with some kind of powerful historical narrative or conclusion as do other British Museum exhibitions, thus failing to live up to that standard in that sense, but the fact that they chose to explore an important subject that spans different cultures was good enough.
In the end, I was a tad disappointed because I thought that it could have offered a lot more, but there was still quite a lot to glean from the various cross-cultural exhibits.
