Friday Salon: SHE MUST BE WIKI: Feminist Film Wiki-a-thon

Ticket Offer: attend both the Feminist Film Friday Salon and She Must Be Seeing Things screening for the reduced price of £10 / £8 Concessions / £6 ICA Members.

Imagine if you looked up your favourite film online and found… nothing. That's the case for far too many classics of feminist film.

The first ICA wiki-a-thon features a Salon with academics, filmmakers and curators. Chaired by moving image artist Sarah Turner, speakers include Elinor Cleghorn, Elizabeth Cowie, Sophie Mayer, and Lucy Reynolds.

This is a chance to further and exchange knowledge of feminist film and film theory. Bring a laptop and determination to shape history. A closed workshop will take place before the Friday Salon to post entries on Wikipedia.

Followed by a 5pm screening of She Must Be Seeing Things (Sheila McLaughlin, 1987).

In partnership with the University of Kent.

Speaker Biographies

Elinor Cleghorn is Network Facilitator for ‘Mirror-Touch: Empathy, Spectatorship, and Synaesthesia’ at the Ruskin School, sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust. Elinor received her PhD from Birkbeck College, with a thesis investigating the embodied use of devices, apparatuses and materials in the production of filmic spectacle. She is a regular visiting lecturer at the University of Brighton and Central St. Martins, and in 2011 programmed a season of events and screenings at the British Film Institute commemorating the 50-year anniversary of the death of avante-garde filmmaker Maya Deren. She has since given invited talks on women’s experimental filmmaking, choreography and dance in film, and silhouette animation, at venues including BFI, Camden Arts Centre, Nottingham Contemporary and the University of Edinburgh, and has participated in panel discussions at Tate Modern and the ICA in London. Cleghorn has published in the Moving Image Review and Arts Journal and LUX Online, and co-edited an issue of the International Journal of Screendance themed 'After Deren'.

Elizabeth Cowie is Professor Emeritus in Film Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury. She was co-founder and co-editor in the 1970s of m/f a journal of feminist theory, and published Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, in 1997, in which she explored feminine desire and its representation in film.  She has subsequently written on film noir, on the horror of the horror film, and on the cinematic dream-work. In Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (Minnesota University Press, 2011) she addressed the politics and pleasures of documentary film as the serious,  as spectacle, and as an art of the real. In ‘Thinking Differently’ (Differences Spring 2010) she examined contemporary theory and what it offers us in thinking about the questions of feminism, femininity and film.  Forthcoming work includes essays on surveillance and documentary, gesture in Egoyan’s Exotica, and voice and the heard in the scene in film.

Sophie Mayer is a freelance writer, editor and arts activist. She is currently writing Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema, which will be published by IB Tauris next year. Her first book was The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love, and she subsequently co-edited There She Goes: Feminism, Filmmaking and Beyond with Corinn Columpar, and Lo personal es politico, an anthology of writing on feminist documentary for Punto de Vista, with Elena Oroz. She is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound and also The F-Word, a UK-based online feminist magazine. Recent essays include 'Dirty Pictures', a look at water and pollution in the work of Lucrecia Martel and Sarah Turner, and 'Cinema Mon Amour,' the first ever study of the relationship between British poetry and British cinema, from her perspective as the UK's only film scholar-poet. 

Lucy Reynolds is a writer, artist and curator. Her work moves between these different forms, bringing them together through questions of feminism, political space, collective practice and film. She is the Moving Image Pathway Leader in the MRes Art: Moving Image at Central St Martins and teaches the history and theory of artists' moving image at the University of Westminster, Goldsmiths College, LUX and the Arnolfini. Her research focuses on expanded cinema and British avant-garde film of the 1970, and she presents talks on artists' film and video at arts venues across the UK, with recent publications including 'Shadow Play in British Expanded Cinema', in The Expanded Cinema Book, Afterall/Tate publications. She has curated film programmes for Tate Modern and Mukha, Antwerp, among others. Her own films, performances and installations have been shown in galleries and cinemas nationally, most recently in Film in Space at Camden Arts Centre.

Sarah Turner is an artist who writes and makes films. Her work spans single screen gallery pieces and feature length projects, and all of her films have toured nationally and internationally and several have been broadcast through artists’ showcases on Channel 4. She was the writer in residence in the Dept of English at the University of York (2004), where she received a Small Grant for the Creative and Performing Arts from the AHRC. Sarah has had feature scripts commissioned by the British Film Institute, Film Four Lab and Zephyr Films. Her feature films Ecology (2007) and Perestroika (2009) are characterized by explorations of technologies, experimental approaches to writing and an engagement with experiences of narrative, immersion and embodiment within the long form film. Currently Director of Fine Art and Reader at the University of Kent, Sarah curated programmes of artists film and video for the LUX, the Arts Council of England, Tate Gallery, and the National Film Theatre.

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