Deborah Schamoni

A.L. Steiner’s exhibition Irthebound frames the central tenet of life on Earth as a multifaceted engagement with the terms and politics of ecofeminism, first coined in writing by French author and activist Françoise d’Eaubonne in her 1974 book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (Feminism or Death). The manifesto outlines the revolutionary potential of environmentalism and feminism to liberate nature and suppressed peoples.

Featuring video, photography, sculpture and archival material, the exhibition draws on d’Eaubonne’s description of a political apparatus that fuses racial crapitalism, sexual orientation and ecological crisis to produce a dire futurity and history defined by patriarchal ignorance, domination, violence and unfettered greed. The exhibition also debut’s Steiner’s film To Change Everything (2023), extending her three-channel documentary More Real Than Reality Itself, which premiered at the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

Irthebound roams the conditions and languages of everyday irthling encounters, managing practical impossibilities of existence or change within the madness of contemporary life. In her expansive practice, Steiner utilizes constructions of photography, video, installation, collage, collaboration, performance, writing and curatorial work channeled through the sensibility of a skeptical queer ecofeminist androgyne.

Le Féminisme ou la Mort, (Feminism or Death) was translated for the first time in English in 2022, published by Verso Books.

Curated by Howie Chen
Produced by Jon Huron, 80WSE
Text: 80WSE, New York
Photos: Carter Seddon