Alongside Gerhard Richter’s Atlas (1962–2013), Hans-Peter Feldmann’s Bilder (1968–1974), and, more recently, Batia Suter’s Parallel Encyclopedia(2004–2016), Marianne Wex’s Let’s Take Back Our Space: “Female” and “Male” Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures (1972–1977) represents one of the most remarkable collections of images organized through associative affinities since Aby Warburg’s seminal Mnemosyne Atlas (1921–1929).

The book was conceived during the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, a period when the concept of “body politics” gained prominence through campaigns against domestic violence and the objectification of women, as well as movements advocating abortion rights. Marianne Wex’s visual and textual survey of gendered body language draws on a corpus of more than 5,000 photographs of human gestures, either taken by the artist in Hamburg or collected from a wide range of media between 1972 and 1977, including advertisements, films, news reports, and historical publications. The project originated in a personal inquiry into how patriarchy conditions bodily behaviour and the representation of bodies in the world.

In a recent conversation with curators Roxana Marcoci and Madeline Weisburg for her exhibition catalogue (MoMA, 2026), Wex reflects on her engagement with the Women’s Liberation Movement and the origins of the project:

“When I was a child, my father was dreadfully patriarchal and a Nazi. He ruled the conversation. My mother was in tears most of the time. My mother later told me that when my eldest sister was born, my father was greatly disappointed and so was my grandfather. They wanted a boy. It was such a conservative time. When my brother was born it was a huge festivity [...] I wanted to document my ideas about women and body language so I got a Japanese medium format Mamiya camera that I could carry around in front of my body without being obvious. I think that if we try to learn what it feels like to sit in these masculine/feminine positions, life mirrors these representations.”

From the initial archive, Wex selected 2,037 images for this publication, responding to a specific question: How, and why, are femininity and masculinity embodied differently across social, political, and artistic contexts? The book is carefully structured around themes that continue to resonate in contemporary discussions of gender, both within art history and in broader social discourse. These include “Man’s Struggle Against Womanpower and the Effects Upon Body Language Throughout the Course of History,” “How the Men of Christianity Took Over an Old Goddess Gesture,” and “Feminine and Masculine Body Forms in Today’s Patriarchy.” Wex concludes her iconographic investigation with two first-person accounts: a reflection on her own bodily experience in the world and a personal narrative of the bodies and gestures she observes during a train journey.

As stated on the back cover, the project was first presented in 1977 as a photographic exhibition at the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst in Berlin, in conjunction with Women Artists International, 1877–1977.