Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic It could be the breath of a mother in the throes of labour or it could be the sea, its roar and sigh sluicing through the gallery’s darkness as waves wash across a nocturnal shoreline. Somewhere, an invisible woman starts to sing, her crystalline soprano as controlled as the marine exhalation is wild.In truth there is a woman in this gallery. So luminous she seems to have absorbed all available light, she gazes at us with omniscient clarity, her headdress unwinding down her back to suggest a sensuality, just like her crimson dress. Yet the broken wheel and palm leaf she holds anchor her into a more forbidding landscape.Of course, we can see she is the subject of a painting: an early 17th-century self-portrait by the Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi in the guise of Saint Catherine of Alexandria and, say scholars, also referencing Hypatia, a fourth-century pagan philosopher and mathematician who was murdered by Christians. Yet to see the female figure like this, alone in the dark with only these breath-shanties for company, is to forget she has only two dimensions.When you tear yourself away from her magnetic regard, you’ll encounter the singer in the film screened in the adjacent gallery. Entitled “Mirror Martyr Mirror Moon” (2024), the film is the centrepiece of a new show by Dublin-based contemporary artist Jesse Jones at Birmingham’s Ikon gallery. Dressed in scarlet to echo Artemisia’s gown, the film’s protagonist, Colombian-American opera singer Stephanie Lamprea, occupies a stage split with a two-way mirror. At times, then, she is a solo prima donna. At times, she sings in harmony with her identical twin. But she also multiplies to become a female collective, at once Amazonian army, Greek chorus and Baroque choir.Lamprea’s voice also shape-shifts. Working from a score put together by contemporary Irish composer Irene Buckley, Lamprea sings arias by both Monteverdi and 17th-century composer Francesca Caccini, who was a friend of Gentileschi. Translated into English and projected in a shining white font on a discreet screen, the libretto, which includes lines such as “Her body was shamefully treated, scattered all over the city”, flashes out like a bleak oracle. Then Lamprea’s voice starts to fracture. Ultimately she and her sisters are so enraptured they could be speaking in tongues. (In truth they are reciting Monteverdi’s lines backwards.)As the film ends, one gallery wall glides into movement as if the gallery itself is shedding a skin. In fact, this is a scrim curtain. As it is unfurled by an invigilator, it reveals a printed image of two naked women, their bodies curving backwards so that their hands and feet touch in an imperfect, yogic circle at the centre of which writhe a cluster of eels, the gleam of their skin echoing that of the dancers’ bodies and that of the woman in the portrait.By now it is impossible not to be mesmerised by the way Jones has woven her multimedia practice — film, performance, sculpture and installation — into this hypnotic solo show. Yet the exhibition’s seed was sown not by Jones herself but by National Treasures, a loans programme where the National Gallery in London lent 12 “masterpieces” to cultural institutions around the UK. The portrait by Gentileschi was offered to Ikon. (The National Gallery has just 27 paintings by women in its permanent collection of more than 2,300 works.)Ikon, which was given no choice as to the painting it would host, decided to frame it through the lens of a contemporary practitioner. Jones, who represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 2017 and has shown at the Guggenheim Bilbao, was an excellent choice. Steeped in Irish feminism, with a particular focus on the relationship between church and state, and accustomed to working with historical archives, she clearly found Gentileschi an enthralling collaborator.Gentileschi’s tumultuous personal story has often eclipsed her art. Born in Rome in 1593, she was one of the few successful female painters of her era and was responsible for splendid, timeless works such as the Uffizi’s “Judith Slaying Holofernes” and the “Saint Catherine”, which celebrate womanhood in its infinite chiaroscuro palette of passion, power, rage, terror, fragility and resilience.But Gentileschi was also a survivor of rape. When the case went to trial, her attacker, the painter Agostino Tassi, was found guilty. Yet it was Gentileschi who was subjected to torture: her fingers were all but crushed. Her witness statements, alongside the many letters she wrote that document her career, motherhood, marriage and at least one soul-shaking love affair, ensure that her life has been scrutinised as closely as her art.Curators have confronted this narrative with mixed results. In 2011, an otherwise fine show at Milan’s Palazzo Reale was ruined by the presence of a suggestively rumpled bed in the opening gallery. Earlier this year a show in Genoa, which included paintings by Tassi and a multimedia retelling of the rape, triggered feminist protests.At Ikon, however, Jones’s sensitive, subtle imagination has won the day. Wisely she has kept her works to a minimum to intensify their intimate rapport with Gentileschi’s painting. Aside from this, Jones’s film and scrim curtain, the exhibition contains just two more elements. At the entrance sits “Head of Prudence”, a fragment of an anonymous 15th-century sculpture of the female allegorical figure; her two faces are said to signify her gift for looking both forwards and backwards.To the side of Gentileschi’s portrait, Jones has installed “Moon” (2024). Evoking a shrine or altar, it sets a glass carafe alongside a plaster model of Jones’s head and a small, spherical stone vessel on a mirror set into a stone trough. With water from a seventh-century Irish holy well in the carafe, its evocation of female fluidity and sacred rite — there is a performance of a water ritual twice a week — chimes not only with Lamprea’s self-replicating incantations but also with the sinuous, piscine women who decorate the scrim curtain.These, as it turns out, are twin choreographers Jessica and Megan Kennedy. Working with Dublin dance-theatre company Junk Ensemble, their limbs encompass not only the sacred eels — who presage good fortune and the healing properties of water — but also the ouroboros, an ancient symbol of resistance and rebirth in the form of a serpent with its tail in its mouth.This exhibition immerses its audience in provocative, playful questions about femaleness, power and creativity, showing how women so often flow and metastasise through different selves. Are we spirit or matter? Starlight or moondust? Does our power lie in speaking out or refusing language in favour of libretti illegible to all but a chosen few?Such questions may be whimsical yet they are as relevant to Jones and her 21st-century sisters as they were to Gentileschi and her surviving child: a daughter christened Prudenzia who trained in her mother’s studio. Gentileschi once said she had “the spirit of Caesar in the soul of a woman”. But Jones reminds us that the 17th-century painter contained multitudes. To September 8, ikon-gallery.orgFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
