With her performance "Ghost in the Spinning Mill" (1985), British artist Monica Ross (1950-2013) recalled the motions and sounds of vanished industrial work in an abandoned spinning mill, paying tribute to the seldom-noticed role of female workers and physical work in contemporary art. This performance was part of the art project "Triple Transformations", which Ross had developed together with her colleagues Shirley Cameron and Evelyn Silver for the former industrial city of Rochdale.

Monica Ross began her artistic career with feminist community actions such as "Feministo: The Women's Postal Art Event" (1975-79) and "Fenix (also known as Phoenix)" (1978-80), which confronted the contradictions between the roles of wife, mother and artist. In the early 1980s, she became active against nuclear armament with the group Sister Seven, where she developed evocative multimedia performances such as "STOP she said" (1982), "Seachange" (1986) and "Like Gold in the Furnace" (1987). Her works are characterized by an awareness of globally growing injustices.

In constant dialogue with the ideas and texts of philosopher Walter Benjamin, media-theoretical and timely questions played an increasingly important role in her performances, installations and text works in the 1990s. How are dictatorships and wars in the 20th century contingent on the development of media? What alternatives to authoritarian use of media are conceivable? Can repetition be a means to help increase awareness of the finest nuances and internalize mindfulness for one's own environment? Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936) in particular was the basis for a series of installations and performances. "This Is Not a Photograph" (1990) deals with the contradiction between the limitless availability of information and the simultaneous persistence of injustice and violence. Elaborate installations such as "passage" (1993) and "fall" (1994) unknowingly made the audience the main character. In video installations such as "Iris" (1998) and the net artwork "justfornow" (2001-2004), the artist condensed artifacts and documents from her performances. A memorable visit to Raphael's "Sistine Madonna" in Dresden inspired Ross to conduct intensive research on the history of the reception of Renaissance paintings and eventually to create the artist's book "valentine" (2000), in which Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Sigmund Freud, Ida Bauer, Lenin, Karl Marx and many others meet.

In her last major performance series "Anniversary—an act of memory" (2008-2013), Ross made clear through the collective recitation of the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" from memory that these rights are by no means self-evident, but vulnerable.

This exhibition is the first comprehensive showing of Monica Ross' works in Germany.

The Leipzig artists group Spiral Threads developed for this exhibition a new art piece in response to Monica Ross’s text “History or Not” (2000). Their wall piece “Now We Stand in a Crowded Gap” (2022) follows up on Ross’s speech, which recounts the activism and art of feminists in 1970s Britain. The artist group followed the narratives and demands of Ross and her contemporaries and spun other narrative threads and accomplices into their web. In doing so, references to buried feminist history emerge at the center that then, as now, are repressed into the particular and private. The title of this new wall piece refers to the unpublished text "Those Who Were Not" (2014) by the authors Caroline Gausden and Alexandra Kokoli.