Feminist Practices in Dialogue

Please note this is an exhibition and entry is with Day Membership. Audience members are free to come and go between 2pm and 5.30pm. There will be video installations and performances taking place throughout the afternoon, however capacity is limited so please arrive on time for events. There is a ticketed discussion in the evening We Are Anti-Capiphallists: Feminist Art Practices In Dialogue, related to this exhibition.

Feminist Practices in Dialogue is an exhibition and a programme of video works, performances, sound pieces and discussions on the challenges facing contemporary feminism

Practice in Dialogue aims to create a space where artists can talk and think critically about the current challenges to feminism in a climate where the backlash against it combines with neoliberalism to reduce the political agenda of feminism to a set of fragmented rights and personal choices that neatly dovetail with capitalism. In this environment, behaviours are divorced from the gendered circumstances within which they have been generated and are recast as feminist. Here feminism becomes about infiltration of the very structures that are responsible for women’s subordination in the first place, rather than a practice that seeks to circumnavigate them and create alternatives.

The event will foreground the importance of art and feminism as lived practices that have the potential to unsettle hegemonic patriarchal structures. Avoiding the pitfalls of dominant heteronormative culture is not easy and, as such, the emphasis of the event will be on feminist art practices as an ongoing work-in-progress that calls for continual self-reflection and critical analysis. The day will explore the methods by which feminist artworks contest the status quo and resist recuperation by the dominant patriarchal system. The artworks and discussion are an invitation to gauge how the artists involved with Practice in Dialogue have responded to contemporary issues while offering the possibility for a thorough and interrogative conversation, which is essential if feminism is to retain its potency.

Practice in Dialogue is a small working group of feminist artists dedicated to examining the formal structures and strategies of historical feminist art alongside their own art practices. Founded by Catherine Long and Rose Gibbs, Practice in Dialogue evolved out of a need to create a space in which to think critically about feminist art practices. Participating artists are: Miriam Austin, Alison Ballance and Abigail Smith, Ingrid Berthon-Moine, Cécile Emmanuelle Borra, Rose Gibbs, Lora Hristova, Catherine Long, Lauren Schnieder, Nicola Thomas.

Programme

2-5.30pm - Feminist Practices in Dialogue exhibition

4pm - Throat of Flesh

Participatory Reading. Rose Gibbs invites audience members to read a short text out loud together, first in unison and then, for those who wish, alone. This is an exploration into feminism's dual program: where it seeks both to bring people together to recognised gendered group treatment while also seeking to find a route to autonomy and liberation from such categorisation. This exploration will be an experience of how the voice has the capacity for both these facets: it engenders a collectivity when used in unison with others, while also alluding to the primary uniqueness that each voice carries.

5pm Preparation for a Joining Ritual

Miriam Austin with Julie Rose Bower and Pepa Ubera

Preparation for a joining ritual is a ceremony performed to prepare two figures for symbolic joining. The ceremony is structured around a group of sculptural objects, designed to be worn and used in specific ways to enact a series of connections and separations that attempt to bring about a mystical union between the participants. The rite attempts to forge a symbolic vocabulary to articulate the complex experience of intimate relationships and focuses on binding, mixing, cutting, encircling, anointing and parting. The structure of the ceremony is informed by a body of research into rituals and folklore associated with mysterious sea creatures displaying anthropomorphic traits, particularly the Taniwha of Maori myth, and the Selkie, who appears in may Northern European folk traditions.

6.30pm - We Are Anti-Capiphallists discussion

This event is curated by ICA Student Forum member Catherine Long in collaboration with Practice in Dialogue participants.