Silence, Third Wave Feminist. A Misandrist Is Talking

Upstream Gallery is pleased to present Silence, Third Wave Feminist. A Misandrist Is Talking a new solo exhibition by Marijke De Roover.

In the age of endless circulation, the worst thing you can do is still speak. Especially if you are a woman who has read too much and forgiven too little. This exhibition does not ask to be heard; it insists on being misheard, which is the only honest form of address left. The title itself is already a crime scene: a command, a confession, and a shitpost all at once. Silence third wave feminist. As if the third wave had not already drowned itself in its own good intentions. A misandrist is talking. Finally.

The works circulate like symptoms. You cannot control them any more than you can control your own unconscious once it has been memefied. They accumulate meanings you never authorised, produce allergic reactions disguised as discourse, and leave you, the author, strangely invisible to yourself in the very moment of hyper-visibility. This is not the vertigo of too much wine. This is the vertigo of watching your own gesture masturbated by the internet without your consent. A ghost of authority you never possessed in the first place.

At the literal and conceptual centre squats My Bed (All work is women’s work). Not Tracey Emin’s bed, though it shamelessly squats on her precedent like an unwanted lover who stayed four days and left the sheets stained with theory. Here the sheets are embroidered with fragments by De Roover, spectral traces of the Seamstresses’ Union, one of the first all-female labour organisations in the Netherlands, those forgotten women who stitched history while the men wrote manifestos. Scattered across the mattress like evidence: dog-eared Dworkin, battered Bates, the whole miserable canon of women who refused to be nice. The bed is unmade, unrepentant, and brutally public. It is intimate in the way a crime scene is intimate. Everyone wants to interpret the stains.

This is not a celebration of vulnerability. Vulnerability is the neoliberal sacrament. This is a declaration of mess as method. Domesticity, depression, theory, and unpaid emotional labour fused into one abject object that refuses to perform productivity or “sex positivity.” All work is women’s work, including the work of being looked at while you fall apart.

Elsewhere, the radfem theory memes operate like ideological IEDs. Stolen quotes, compressed fury, radical feminist thought brutalised into shareable format. They do not explain. They bite. Born in the brief, regrettable experiment known as “trying heterosexuality again,” they function like borrowed glasses with the wrong prescription: suddenly everything is too sharp, too clear, and slightly nauseating. The theft is not hidden; the theft is the point. In a culture that rewards circulation over consequence, the meme becomes the perfect Trojan horse: funny, contagious, cruel, and utterly uninterested in your performative allyship. A jester who knows the king is impotent but still enjoys describing his tiny dick in precise Lacanian terms.

And then, looming on the walls like digital altarpieces: I Meet Someone / They Leave. Two video installations, each placed atop the viral “I meet someone” wall sticker, merging the aesthetics of the endless scroll with the unbearable duration of video art. They function as persiflage on Žižek videos, pop-philosophy, and the entire libidinal circus of contemporary culture. You watch a woman in an high vis vest explaining her own abandonment through Lacan, through the Real, through the obscene underside of liberal tolerance. One dissects the Epstein circuit, elite male impunity, the Lolita Express as symptom. The other performs a ruthless radfem porn analysis: a cold, clinical, and savagely funny vivisection of today’s pornographic imaginary, where desire, trauma, capital, and “empowerment” fuck in perfect synchrony while liberal feminism applauds from the sidelines.

The exhibition offers no catharsis, no healing, no sisterhood. Only the vertiginous honesty of a misandrist who has stopped pretending her rage is “complicated.” The circulation continues. The meanings multiply like mould. You will be misunderstood beautifully. You will be hated accurately. And somewhere in that gap, between the unmade bed, the biting memes, and the videos that refuse to look away, something like truth flickers: sharp, funny, and completely ungovernable.

Come closer.
A misandrist is talking.
Try to silence her.

Marijke De Roover (1990, Belgium) is a performance and visual artist based in Ghent. She holds a BA and MA in Fine Arts from KASK School of Arts, Ghent, where she was nominated for the Start Point Prize (Prague). In 2021, she had her first solo exhibition in the Netherlands at Museum de Pont, Tilburg.

Her work has been exhibited at Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museum für Neue Kunst (Freiburg), Museum de Pont (Tilburg), EMST (Athens), M HKA (Antwerp), Garage Rotterdam, Point Éphémère (Paris), UNTITLED (Moscow), BOZAR (Brussels), Extra City Kunsthal (Antwerp), Mu.ZEE (Ostend), ARCADE (London), KIOSK (Ghent), ISELP (Brussels), Museum Angewandte Kunst (Frankfurt am Main), among others.

 

Image: Silence, Third Wave Feminist. A Woman Who Noticed Men Kinda Suck Is About to Speak, 2025 by Marijkde De Roover.