PVF 2026 Exhibitions | The Library Inside the Library

Like every year, the Festival offers a selection of publications to help visitors deepen their understanding of the themes explored in the exhibitions and in the talks taking place throughout the four days of the Festival. This year, the books and magazines featured in the library address the presence and absence of women in the arts and media from different perspectives. Some focus on the female gaze and how its meaning has evolved over time; some investigate the role of women in images, both still and moving; others question our definitions of girlhood and womanhood, and the boundaries and limitations we imposed on them.

All these texts ask us who can inhabit the streets, the galleries, the imagination, and all spaces, both physical and conceptual, that we often consider fixed, but which are, sometimes subtly, sometimes more overtly, always gendered. Yet gender is not the only lens through which women are seen: class, race, and environmental issues intersect to create a dense network of concepts, solutions, imaginative pathways, and open questions.

Focusing on how women see, think, and represent themselves is not a way of closing oneself off without opening to the other, to the masculine, and to everything that is usually opposed to the world of women. Nor is it an act of opposition, trapped in a reductive binary with the masculine. Rather, it is an act of self-knowledge, of understanding one’s own past, of examining how others have looked at oneself, in order to discover a new perspective in which to feel comfortable, and from which one can then open up to the other, to meet and know them fully consciously. These publications avoid simplistic solutions and easy answers and, in line with the Festival’s approach, invite readers to ask questions, especially the ones we are most afraid to ask ourselves.

The titles included in the Library:

The Female Gaze in Art and Photography, Anita Selzer, Hardie Grant Publishing, 2023

Heroines, Kate Zambreno, Corsair, 2024

Women in the Picture: Women, Art and the Power of Looking, Catherine McCormack, Icon Books, 2021

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey

A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind, Siri Hustvedt, Simon and Schuster, 2016

Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, Sophie Gilbert, 2025

Love & Lightning, A Collection of Queer and Feminist Manifestos, Edited by Sarah van Binsbergen, Liz Allan, Jessica Gysel, Sara Kaaman, 2025

Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, Lauren Elkin, Chatto & Windus/FSG, 2023

Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance, Uri Mcmillan, NYU Press, 2015

The Witch′s Flight. The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense, Kara Keeling, Duke University Press, 2007

Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze, Charlotte Jansen, Orion Publishing Co, 2017