WE CALL YOU! Sisters! Mothers! Workers! 

WE CALL YOU! Sisters! Mothers! Workers!

22 July – 6 December 2025

Petra Bauer in collaboration with: Southall Black Sisters, SCOT-PEP, Marius Dybwad Brandrud, Carolina Sinisalo, Frances Stacey and Marta Dauliūtė

Guest Curator: Benison Kilby, PhD Candidate

WE CALL YOU! Sisters! Mothers! Workers! is the first exhibition in Australia by the international artist and filmmaker Petra Bauer. The exhibition brings together films from her series Looking for Jeanne, made collaboratively with the feminist organisations Southall Black Sisters and SCOT-PEP, as well as filmmaker Marius Dybwad Brandrud, activist Carolina Sinisalo, curator Frances Stacey and director and producer Marta Dauliūtė. Demonstrating Bauer’s commitment to exploring film as a political practice — a means of grass roots organising, community-building and consciousness raising – Bauer’s collaborations often involve an exchange of knowledge with the feminist activist organisations over a number of years. The films take Chantal Akerman’s film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce,1080 Bruxelles (1975) as a point of departure, addressing a number of its themes, including motherhood and sex work. One of the most original features of Jeanne Dielman are the long, uninterrupted scenes of domestic labour, such as preparing dinner, making coffee and cleaning the bath, which are frequently held on screen until the task is completed. Bauer draws on this aesthetic strategy, carefully framing mundane tasks of cleaning and food preparation and making visible normally devalued forms of feminised labour. The series shows that these everyday tasks are integral to political organising and resistance. 

This exhibition is part of the inaugural Kinnane PhD in Art History by Exhibition supervised by Dr Paolo Magagnoli and Associate Professor Andrea Bubenik, School of Communication and Arts, Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. It is supported by a generous endowment from Tony and Paula Kinnane.