Sotheby’s and Unicorn Dao are honored to present My Body My Business, a sale specially curated by Unicorn DAO co-founder and Pussy Riot creator Nadya Tolokonnikova, with a portion of proceeds from this sale benefiting reproductive healthcare organizations, including Planned Parenthood. This sale includes a variety of works from traditional and digitally native women artists, who use their art as a medium to advocate and explore a wide range of topics related to women's rights, including reproductive rights, gender-based violence, body image, representation and many more. These artists are united in their commitment to creating art that challenges existing power structures, promoting gender equality, and celebrating the diverse experiences and perspectives of women.
My Body My Business is a dialogue between some of the most established artists in the traditional art scene as well as trailblazing digital art creators empowered by a common cause. Pussy Riot (Nadya Tolokonnikova) will also include her own work titled Fragile Masculinity Genesis, which serves as the initial piece of a broader project that is set to unfold in the upcoming months, involving performance, audio-visual work as well as an installation by Pussy Riot. This piece will be exhibited alongside exceptional works by Marina Abramovic, Cindy Sherman, Sarah Meyohas, Jenny Holzer and many other talented female artists.
Michele Pred is a Swedish-American conceptual artist whose practice includes sculpture, assemblage, and performance. Her work uncovers the cultural and political meaning behind everyday objects, with a concentration on feminist themes such as equal pay, reproductive rights, and personal security. Pred’s projects also contain social components that drive the conversation into public spaces. Examples include her exploration of the intersection of personal space and security by using airport-confiscated items after 9/11, the cultural background of the fight for reproductive rights, using thousands of expired birth control pills, and the continuing economic and political struggle for women’s rights, represented by her modified vintage handbag editions. Pred has been represented by the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York since 2004. Her work is part of the permanent collection at the Berkeley Art Museum, the 21st C Museum, the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York, the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, and the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York. Pred received a Pro-Choice Leadership Award from Personal PAC, Chicago, and has shown at Jack Shainman Gallery as an original member of For Freedoms. Pred has exhibited both nationally and internationally at the V&A Museum in London, The Berkeley Art Museum (BAMPFA) in Berkeley, CA; Neuberger Museum, White Plains, NY; Bild Museet and Kulturhuset in Sweden; University of Westminster, London; Museum of Craft and Folk Art, San Francisco; the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia; Omi International Art Center, Ghent, NY; ASU Museum, Tempe, AZ; the Honolulu Museum of Art, HI; Museum of Design Atlanta, amongst others.
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Helena Sarin, lives and works in New Jersey. She is a visual artist, software engineer and maker (she calls herself an engineering artist) who has always worked with cutting-edge technologies for tech companies. Having explored in her career more traditional mediums like watercolor, pastel and photography; art and software ran as parallel tracks in her life, all her art being analog, until she discovered GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks). Since then generative models became her primary medium — creating at the intersection of technology and art elevated her artistic voice.
Since the beginning of her career in Belgrade during the early 1970s, Marina Abramović has pioneered performance art, creating some of the form's most important early works. Exploring her physical and mental limits, she has withstood pain, exhaustion, and danger in her quest for emotional and spiritual transformation
Abramović was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale. In 2010, Abramović had her first major U.S. retrospective and simultaneously performed for over 700 hours in “The Artist is Present” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Abramović founded Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a platform for immaterial and long durational work to create new possibilities for collaboration among thinkers of all fields.
Her most recent publication is Walk Through Walls: A Memoir, Published by Crown Archetype on October 25, 2016. Her retrospective The Cleaner opened at Moderna Museet, Stockholm in February 2017 and has toured to seven additional European venues, ending at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia in 2019. In September 2020 the Bayerische Staats Oper presented the world premiere of 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, which will continue to tour to other venues. In 2023 she will present the solo exhibition After Life at the Royal Academy, and become the first female artist in the institution’s 250 year history to occupy the entire gallery space with her work.
Olive Allen is a New York-based NFT artist and tech entrepreneur working at the intersection of art, tech, and gaming. She is a cryptocurrency early adopter and one of the pioneers of the NFT space.
ORLAN is a French artist known for her provocative, often controversial, performances and installations that challenge societal norms and question the representation of women in art. ORLAN's work has been celebrated as a powerful contribution to the feminist art movement, as she explores issues related to women's bodies, sexuality, and agency. By exposing the social constructs that limit women's freedom and expression, ORLAN's work has become a symbol of the struggle for women's rights and the fight against gender-based discrimination.
Sarah Meyohas is a conceptual artist whose practice considers the nature and capabilities of emerging technologies in contemporary society. Using the familiar emblems of biological life, Meyohas investigates the complex operations that increasingly govern our world: soaring birds, created using augmented-reality software, flock in unison with the frenetic variations of the stock market; rose petals, aggregately identical but individually unique, comprise the dataset for their AI-created equivalents; Bitchcoin, a cryptocurrency backed by physical artworks, questions the speculative value of cryptocurrency and the ineffable value of art. Meyohas creates an intelligible visual language to articulate the systems and technologies that increasingly influence our world. In February 2015, Sarah Meyohas launched a social token, Bitchcoin, a cryptocurrency which could be exchanged in perpetuity for her work. Meyohas backed each original Bitchcoin with a five inch by five-inch portion of her Speculations photographs. These works, created through the manipulation of physical reflective surfaces and water in a traditional photographic studio set-up, portrayed perspectival tunnels extending into infinity. The series is continued to this day, existing both as physical editions and unique NFTs on Ethereum. Functioning as a visual and poetic interpretation of the blockchain technology itself, they hold up a mirror to the alchemical ways in which value is created by the artistic gesture and embodied in art as a financial asset.
Fawn Rogers (born in Portland, Oregon) is a Los Angeles-based contemporary artist. Through painting, photography, video, and sculptural installation, Rogers addresses the idea of power as the currency of human nature and the conflict with the natural world. Her aesthetic incorporates realism, conceptualism, and the synthesis of text and image. Interested in social constructionism, her art recognizes a full range of existence, including violence, innocence, and invention.
