Symposium: Feminisms and Curatorial Collaborations

This half-day symposium poses questions about synergies between feminist theory and practice and curatorial practices and collaborations. Keeping the focus on methods and strategies manifesting in curatorial practices, we meet together to address issues relating to solidarity, friendship, ethics of care and working collaboratively and/ or collectively in the framework of the role that feminisms play in these forms of working with art. The symposium thrives to create an intimate and informal atmosphere for a dialogic exchange between invited speakers. The talks will be followed by a roundtable discussion.

Organised by Basia Sliwinska and Elina Suoyrjo, CREATE/Feminisms research cluster, Middlesex University

Programme

11.15 Introduction by Basia Sliwinska and Elina Suoyrjo

11.30 – 12.05 Irene Revell & Lina Džuverović (Electra) "We falter with feminist conviction”/ Notes on assumptions, expectations confidence and doubt in the feminist art organisation 

What does it mean to run a feminist/collaborative/collective organisation that challenges dominant structures, methodologies and goals? What acts of self-sacrifice may be embedded in such a claim? How can a feminist organisation/action exist in neoliberal precarious market conditions? How often are these questions articulated and outlined at the inception of such organisations - or can they be? What are the invisible assumptions in working in an arts environment with a certain ethical code? This jointly-presented talk sketches out a series of notes on this topic, taking the organisation Electra as a primary case-study, alongside historical examples and several more speculative theoretical prescriptions. 

Electra is a London-based art organisation which presents projects with artists working across performance, sound, moving image and text, on questions of political and social urgency. Currently led by Irene Revell, Electra was founded in 2003 by Lina Džuverović and Anne Hilde Neset as a means of producing the Her Noise project, which sought to address the ‘historical blind spots’ of women in the history of 20th Century sound practice(s), and their contemporary successors.

12.05 – 12.45 Carla Cruz - All My Independent Women

Carla Cruz talks about All My Independent Women, a feminist exhibition project aiming to articulate a critique of the art world, which she led between 2005 and 2015. Initiated as a recuperation project, after 2010 AMIW endeavoured to transform from being a collective exhibition of artistic practices done under feminist influence, to becoming a truly feminist artistic project where feminism was no longer a thematic but a methodology. This was accomplished by reviewing the desire for visibility according to the mainstream art world canon, and by installing the project itself as a network of artists based on solidarity and affiliation to feminisms that allows us to produce and present our practices to a concerned public.

12.45-1.30 Lunch break

1.30-2.05 Giulia Lamoni and Margarida Brito Alves - We do not come from the same place… how come we speak the same language? Curatorial collaborations and friendship

The intervention explores processes of collaboration that aim to connect teaching and research activities informed by feminist positioning in an academic context to curatorial practices. Drawing on their experience of collaborating as both researches and co-curators in the Portuguese context—an ongoing relation marked by both affinity and difference—Lamoni and Alves reflect on their current attempt to articulate collaborative and collective curatorial projects that methodologically draw on friendship as a means of envisioning new possible modes of working together.

2.05-2.40 Lucy Stein - On the exhibition NEO-PAGAN BITCH-WITCH! and raising power in a commercial gallery context

Lucy Stein’s talk focuses on the exhibition NEO-PAGAN BITCH-WITCH!, which was up in February and March 2016 at Evelyn Yard Gallery in London. The show was co-curated with artist France-Lise McGurn and featured work by only women and only the artists’ friends. Lucy discusses her and France-Lise’s reasons for wanting to make this show, the process in which they chose the artists and works, the reading that was done around the show, the problems that were provoked, including those that remained unresolved. Lucy will discuss her interest in magic and esoteric channels of thinking, and relate this to feminism. She discusses the idea of the epic in relation to feminism and the feminine. Lucy also talks about previous collaborations including those with France-Lise McGurn, Shana Moulton and Simon Bayliss.

2.40-3.15 Roundtable with Lara Perry and general discussion

Speakers

Lina Džuverović is a curator and Lecturer at the Fine Art Department at the University of Reading. Formerly she was Artistic Director at Calvert 22 Foundation (2011-2014) and Director of Electra, a London-based commissioning organisation, which she co-founded in 2003. She is also a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art and Tate, researching Pop Art in the former Yugoslavia. Selected curatorial projects include Monuments Should Not Be Trusted (Nottingham Contemporary, 2016), Sanja Iveković - Unknown Heroine (South London Gallery and Calvert 22, 2013); IRWIN – Time For A New State & NSK Folk Art (Calvert 22, 2012); 27 Senses (Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2010), Favoured Nations, Momentum, 5th Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art (2009), Her Noise (South London Gallery, 2005) 

Irene Revell is a curator and writer who has been working across professional and ‘DIY’ registers over the past sixteen years. Her work seeks out new contexts and connections for practices with challenging social and political implications. She is Director of Electra; a member of the Cinenova Working Group; and Visiting Curator on the MA Sound Arts, UAL. Recent collaborative projects include Cinenova series Now Showing (2015-); The Multiversal Score, Wysing Arts Centre (2015); Someone Else Can Clean Up This Mess, Flat Time House (2014). Recent writing includes a forthcoming contribution to Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image (ed Lucy Reynolds, I.B.Tauris, 2016), and contributions to journals including OnCurating.org (with Lina Dzuverovic, forthcoming), Caesura/Accesso (forthcoming), Camera Austria (with Kerstin Schroedinger), NOIT, Psykick Dancehall, The Wire magazine. She was associate editor of Aftershow: Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz (Sternberg, 2014).

Carla Cruz is a London-based artist whose project All My Independent Women experiments with forms of collectivity, the erasure of authorship and practices that take place outside and in defiance of the mainstream art system. Carla’s research has resulted in the genesis of a community cultural centre in Guimarães, rural Portugal called RASTILHO. Carla has a practiced based PhD by Goldsmiths University of London. She has recently completed the residency Finding Money at Open School East, London with the artist Antonio Contador funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and is an AHRC funded Research Associate for Goldsmiths, based at the community centre The Mill.

Margarida Brito Alves is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Art History at Faculty of Human and Social Sciences of the Universidade Nova of Lisbon (UNL) - where she coordinates the Contemporary Art Studies research group of the Instituto de História da Arte. She is the author of A Revista Colóquio / Artes (Lisboa: Colibri, 2007) and O Espaço na Criação Artística do Século XX. Heterogeneidade. Tridimensionalidade. Performatividade. (Lisboa: Colibri, 2012). In 2014, she co-curated the exhibition Salette Tavares: Visual Poetry, at Contemporary Art Center of Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon.

Giulia Lamoni is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Art History at Faculty of Human and Social Sciences of the Universidade Nova of Lisbon (UNL). She holds a post-doctoral position at Instituto de História da Arte of UNL. Her research project, financed by FCT Portugal, focuses on feminist perspectives on Portuguese and Brazilian contemporary art. She has published texts in academic journals like n.paradoxa and fkw journal: Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur, and contributed to books and catalogues published by Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou and the Contemporary Art Center of Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon.

Lara Perry is a feminist historian of museums and visual culture, and the programme leader for History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton. She is the author of History's Beauties: Women and the National Portrait Gallery, 1856-1900 (2006) and co-editor with Angela Dimitrakaki of Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures, and Curatorial Transgressions (2013).  In 2010-2012 she hosted an international research network on Feminism and Curating, funded by the Leverhulme Foundation, which included events in Washington DC, Stockholm, Tallinn, Montreal and Brighton. Lara is co-editor of the forthcoming issue of the online journal OnCurating devoted to Curating and Feminist Thought.

Lucy Stein was born in Oxford, UK. She’s a Taurus, Scorpio rising; synesthete; painter. In 2015 she completed a residency at Tate St Ives, UK, which culminated in a collaborative musical performance titled The Wise Wound. Recent solo exhibitions include On Heat at Galerie der Stadt Schwaz, Schwaz / Tirol, Austria; Moonblood/Bloodmoon at Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zurich, Switzerland; Big Farmer at Piper Keys, London, UK; and Retention (alongside Shana Moulton) at Gimpel Fils, London. Squirming the Worm, a radio show presented by Stein's alter ego Coco de Moll and produced by artist Simon Bayliss, is broadcast fortnightly on NTS. She paints live in the band Death Shanties with Alex Neilson and Sybren Renema. In February 2015 she co-curated the show NEO-PAGAN BITCH-WITCH! at Evelyn Yard, London, with Glasgow based artist France-Lise McGurn.