Women in Revolt:

radical acts, contemporary resonances

This two-day conference at Tate Britain presents new research and explores current debates on feminist art practice from an international array of speakers. 

Through a discursive programme of panels, artist talks, roundtable discussion and reading groups, Women in Revolt: Radical Acts and Contemporary Resonances situates the historical focus initiated by the major survey of feminist art practices in the Tate exhibition Women in revolt! Arts and Activism in the UK 1970–1990 as part of a wider contemporary and global context. 

With a particular focus on the live and performance-based arts, sound and moving image practices that were an integral part of feminist creative and campaigning activities of the 1970s and 1980s, the conference introduces international perspectives from researchers, artists and thinkers engaging with feminist histories and current art practices.

PROGRAMME 

THURSDAY 21 MARCH

_____

Exhibition opening, 6pm – 8.30pm (free to all, introductions 7pm)

Improvising Antiphony: The Lindsay Cooper Archive

Curated by MA Curating and Collections, Chelsea College of Arts (UAL) 

Chelsea Space | Chelsea College of Arts (UAL) 

(John Islip Street, opposite Tate Britain, next to the parade ground) 

Drawing on the spirit of improvisation, Improvising Antiphony encourages visitors to listen, feel and respond to a generation of women’s sounds influenced by Lindsay Cooper. Improvising Antiphony exhibits photographs, documents, and audio from the Lindsay Cooper Archive, housed at the University of the Arts London Archives and Special Collections Centre.

Exhibition continues Friday 22 March (12pm–8pm) and Saturday 23 March (11am–5pm).

For information please see the Chelsea Space website.

---

FRIDAY 22 MARCH

_____

---

SATURDAY 23 MARCH 

_____

ABSTRACTS AND BIOGRAPHIES

PANEL 1

Friday 22 March | 10am –11.30am | Clore Auditorium

Other ecologies: collective work and the politics of space 

‘And Others: The Gendered Politics and Practices of Art Collectives –  A Feminist Exploration of Labour in Performance, Sound and Moving Image work in Yugoslav Collectives in 1970s and 1980s’ 

Lina Džuverović (Chelsea College of Art, University of the Arts London) 

Who does what type of work in collective art-making? Who is seen and who remains invisible? Who tells the story and whose names enter histories? How are different forms of labour valued in collective practice?

These are some of the questions that the And Others network has been exploring for the past eighteen months through a series of group-authored documents, panel discussions and workshops held as part of Lina Dzuverovic’s research project And Others: The Gendered Politics and Practices of Art Collectives. Current enthusiasm towards collectivity across the artworld harbours a certain romanticisation of collectives. This simplification suggests that collective work – be it artistic, curatorial or organizational – is somehow automatically emancipatory and egalitarian, by its nature preserving the promise of equality and inclusivity. However, the reality of working collectively is filled with challenges and inequalities, and those working in this way are no less vulnerable to exploitation than individual cultural workers.

This illustrated lecture will examine the inner workings and division of labour in collective practice, seeking to highlight inequalities, forms of silencing and marginalising of certain participants, often along gender lines. We will use methodologies developed by the And Others network so far, to explore performance, moving image and sound networks in the former Yugoslavia during the 1970s and 1980s.

Dr Lina Džuverović is a curator and Course Leader on the MA Curating and Collections, Chelsea College of Art. She is currently co-curating the 60th October Salon, Belgrade, Serbia, 2024. Lina’s research focuses on collectivity in art and the process of writing feminist art histories as a site of solidarity and community-building. Her current research project And Others: The Gendered Politics and Practices of Art Collectives, was awarded Bard College’s Centre for Arts and Human Rights Faculty Fellowship (2022). Previously Lina was Artistic Director of London’s Calvert 22 Foundation; founding Director of Electra, Media Arts Curator at ICA, London, co-curator of Momentum Biennial 2009 and has taught contemporary art in the UK and Austria.

www.artcollectives.org

www.dzuverovic.org

‘Devour Everything: The United Farm Workers at the Los Angeles Women’s Building and Beyond’ 

Katie Anania (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) 

In marches and rallies across California in the 1960s and 1970s, the United Farm Workers (UFW) not only consolidated Chicanx identities, but also forged a broad Third World-aligned labour movement through public agitation. UFW members picketed grocery stores with anti-corporate signs and chants, conducted pesticide tests of fruits and vegetables, and convinced housewives to sue growers and grocery stores for pesticide exposure – all to demonstrate the ways that brown bodies were sacrifice points for global capitalism. By 1973, UFW events in East Lost Angeles – which included street theatre, singing, and portable murals and altars – were attracting Los Angeles feminists from the adjacent Westlake neighbourhood, who were preparing to open the Women’s Building and host Women’s Graphic Programs there. This paper reveals the ways that these ecologically informed multimedia events shaped emerging understandings of intersectional identity among Southern California feminist artists. Animating the talk is a discussion of the relationship between the Chicana muralist Judy Baca, a Women’s Building artist who collaborated with the UFW, and the lesbian feminist artist Maria Karras, who featured Baca in her media campaign about bi-cultural women, Both Here and There which was displayed on public buses between Westlake and East Los Angeles. 

Katie Anania is a scholar and curator of the arts of the Americas who specialises in queer and hemispheric ways of knowing, particularly in makers’ relationships with their materials. Her first book, Out of Paper: Drawing, Environment, and the Body in 1960s America, is forthcoming in June 2024 from Yale University Press. She currently works as an assistant professor of art history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she directs Art, Data, and Environment/s, an interdisciplinary consortium that uses art and design history to consider colonial histories of water use and resource extraction. She is @thevillagecharlatan on Instagram. 

‘Strip Searching – Security or Subjugation?’ 

Isobel Harbison (Goldsmiths, University of London) 

In 1984, newly funded by the Channel 4’s workshop scheme, the Derry Film and Video Workshop (DFVW) completed their first documentary ‘Strip Searching – Security or Subjugation’ (later titled ‘Stop Strip Searching’). Initially shown in a variety of contexts, it was invited to be screened to a sub-committee of the European Parliament in 1986. Directed by Anne Crilly, this film challenged the systematic strip-searching of republican women held in Armagh Gaol under British occupation. The issue of strip-searching had intensified debates about the intersection of struggles for national liberation and women’s liberation in the north of Ireland. For DFVW’s first film, they taught themselves the technicalities of filmmaking to platform to this urgent issue. Crilly and the DFVW interviewed ex-prisoners inside or outside their homes about the experiences, editing in commissioned drawings and staged photographs to represent invasive, unsupervised, and largely undocumented searches on women of all ages, even when pregnant. Additionally, they interviewed a law professor, psychiatrist, priest, journalist, and trade unionist on this subject. This paper will consider this work in context, and how variously the DFVW’s filmmaking posed questions about gender and nation in an internationalist framework, appealing to audiences in and (as importantly) beyond Ireland and Britain. 

Dr Isobel Harbison is Senior Lecturer in the Art Department, Goldsmiths. In 2019, her monograph Performing Imagewas published by MIT Press. Harbison’s current academic research focuses on the international and intersectional history of moving image in Northern Ireland since 1968, its challenge to state-sanctioned media and various instances of censorship and intervention. The research has been supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Association of Art History, published by Afterall Journal and the British Art Studies Journal, and informed public events including Tapes Under the Bed (co-curated with Sara Greavu) at IMMA, Dublin. 

‘Sister Screenings: Bringing Feminist Archive Film to New Audiences’ 

Invisible Women (Rachel Pronger) and T A P E Collective (Isra Al Kassi) 

Archive activist feminist film collective Invisible Women regularly curate screenings that bring together archive and contemporary works in programmes which draw connections across time, while T A P E Collective have a track record championing films exploring representation, identity and heritage. Both collectives propose radical film histories with women, non-binary and marginalised gender filmmakers at the centre of an alternative film canon. In this presentation, we use as a case study two collaboratively curated film programmes, both of which toured nationally in 2022. Touched was an alternative Valentine’s Day programme celebrating the diversity and fluidity of desire. After Hourswas a programme exploring the connections between urban space, music, gentrification, and activism through feminist and queer lenses. Both programmes combined archive film from the 1970s–1990s (including work by Pratibha Parmar, Clio Barnard, Ruth Lingford and Sarah Turner) with contemporary shorts (e.g. B.O.S.S, Katayoun Jalilipour, Lois Stevenson and Adura Onashile). This presentation will discuss the principles that underpin our curatorial practice (which are deeply inspired by sister collectives and filmmakers of preceding generations), the practical challenges (and rewards) of working with this material and the power of drawing intergenerational connections when screening historic films to public audiences. 

Invisible Women is an archive activist film collective which champions the work of women and filmmakers with marginalised identities from cinema history through screenings, events and editorial. Since 2017, they have screened film programmes at cinemas, festivals and galleries across the UK and Europe. They have presented events with partners including Edinburgh Art Festival, Flatpack Birmingham, A Kind of Seeing, CinemaAttic, Cinema Rediscovered, London Short Film Festival, Glasgow Film Festival, HOME Manchester, EYE Filmmuseum Amsterdam, Balkan Can Kino Athens, Sheffield DocFest, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Feminist Elsewheres Berlin and BFI Southbank. Current members of Invisible Women are Camilla Baier, Lauren Clarke and Rachel Pronger. www.invisible-women.co.uk

T A P E was founded in 2015 by Angela Moneke and Isra Al Kassi after meeting through the Barbican Young Programmers scheme. T A P E launched as a response to the lack of representation on screen; wanting to platform and highlight the sheer variety of under-served films out there. Over the years T A P E has curated a number of well-rounded screenings bringing together film, art, music, talks and more into one space and events with a focus on representation, identity and heritage; bringing exciting screenings to new audiences, championing the forgotten could-be cult films of the festival circuit with a focus on programmes of women of colour both behind and in front of the camera.

Dr Althea Greenan (chair) works in Special Collections and Archives at Goldsmiths, University of London curating the Women’s Art Library (WAL) collection. She programmes projects that support artists, students and academics working with the wide range of materials and archives in the WAL This work is the subject of a film by Holly Antrum commissioned by the Art360 Foundation titled Yes to the Work!: The Women’s Art Library (2023). Additional roles include co-curating the Animating Archives website and sitting on the Advisory Board of Feminist Art Making Histories, an oral history, digital humanities project, funded by the Irish Research Council and the AHRC. 

www.art360foundation.org.uk/media

sites.gold.ac.uk/animatingarchives

PANEL 2 

Friday 22 March | 12pm – 1.30pm | Clore Auditorium 

Beyond Her Noise: Feminisms and the Sonic 

Organised by Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP, UAL) 

‘Mappings and Journeys: tracing some feminist sonic cartographies’ 

Cathy Lane 

Feminist work in sound was arguably much slower to be established than within either music or art. This short presentation will discuss some of the serendipities, catalysts and routes that have led to my own work in seeking to establish feminist sound practices as a legitimate and nascent field.

Cathy Lane is an artist, composer and academic. She works primarily in sound, combining oral history, archival recordings, spoken word and environmental recordings to investigate histories, environments, our collective and individual memories, and the forces that shape them. She is inspired by places or themes which are rooted in everyday experience and is particularly interested in ‘hidden histories’ and historical amnesia and how this can be investigated from a feminist perspective through the medium of composed sound. She is interested in what other people hear and don’t hear and the stories that they tell about these listenings. Most of her work is in the form of gallery installations, concert pieces, books, and essays. She is Professor of Sound Arts at University of the Arts London and directs Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP), a UAL research centre. 

www.cathylane.co.uk

‘The Sonic Artefact’

Louise Gray 

Interviews and testimonies are two methods in which a speaker’s invaluable personal accounts of an event are used to construct a record of some type. However, what we normally read and hear is an edited version of an original raw material, an imperfect translation of a sonic act that has been radically recontextualised. In this intervention, I propose that we return to the sonicity of the encounter between interview and narrator, between narrator and editor, to consider the record not as a closed space, but rather a place filled with reverberating meaning, a third space between narrator and listener/technology – a sonic artefact – produces new meaning and new listening. 

Louise Gray writes on music and sound art for The Wire and other publications. Her interest in the sonic knowledge created through dialogue came out of doctoral research, which used in-depth interviews with five post-1945 female composers, each one working in a different transmission of music and sound art, as a way of understanding the methods and networks necessary to create work. Her recent writing has focused on ways of listening in the works of Eliane Radigue, Annea Lockwood and Pauline Oliveros. Louise also teaches on the BA and MA Sound Arts courses at LCC, University of the Arts London. 

‘Whispered Screaming’ 

Tomoko Hojo 

This performance was first presented at the concert Japanese Women Experimental Sound Artists, which I curated at the Emily Harvey Foundation, NYC. The work is based on Yoko Ono’s discography, in which the screams from across her recordings (the parts that have no lyrics and are pure screaming) are extracted and re-recorded/performed in my own voice. These are not the usual loud screams, but silent whispered shouts: an overlaying of whispered screams allows the overlapping of other voices. By accumulating and emanating unvoiced and dehumanising voices and sounds, this is an attempt at a small resistance to the violence that exists at different levels in different parts of the world. 

Tomoko Hojo is a sound artist working within the fluidities between sound, music and performance. Recently she has developed a series of archival projects around Yoko Ono in Tokyo, London and New York. She has an ongoing collaborative project with Swiss sound artist Rahel Kraft. She also co-ordinates and performs as part of the Tokyo-based Ensemble for Experimental Music and Theater. In 2016–17 she was a visiting researcher at CRiSAP, and in 2019 she co-organised the Tokyo edition of Sound::Gender::Feminism::Activism. 

www.tomokohojo.net  

‘Sonic Cyberfeminisms’ 

Annie Goh 

In this short presentation I will give an overview of the Sonic Cyberfeminisms project, a collaboration initiated by Marie Thompson and myself since 2015. Sonic Cyberfeminisms is a conceptual tool and an organising rubric which interrogates the relationship between gender, feminist praxis, sound and technology. Current Sonic Cyberfeminisms participants include Marlo De Lara, Jane Frances Dunlop, Natalie Hyacinth, Miranda Iossifidis, Louise Lawlor, Frances Morgan and Shanti Suki Osman (formerly Robin Buckley). 

Annie Goh is an artist and researcher working primarily with sound, space, electronic media, and generative processes within their social and cultural contexts. She co-curated the discourse program of CTM Festival Berlin 2013-2016 and is an editorial member of Feminist Review since 2022. She is Course Leader of BA Sound Arts at LCC, UAL and a member of CRiSAP (Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice). 

www.anniegoh.net

‘Collective Listening Across Distance’ 

Shortwave Collective (Brigitte Hart, Georgia Leigh-Münster, Hannah Kemp-Welch and Lisa Hall) 

This performance-presentation shares the praxis and the thinking behind our methodology of listening across distance. We use radio-listening to consider together the situatedness and the material and cultural ecologies of radio, as well as how we understand what listening is and can be, within a collective feminist practice. 

Shortwave Collective is an international, interdisciplinary artist group, brought together by an interest in feminist practices and the radio spectrum. The collective’s approach aims to create an inclusive and collaborative tech-based learning environment, which attends to gendered education gaps. Recent commissions include Living Radio Lab (2023), an open studio for DIY making and public programme at Struer Tracks Biennial (DK); and Constellations of Listening (2022), a 22-hour broadcast on the theme of radio-listening for Radio Art Zone (LU). Shortwave Collective are: Alyssa Moxley, Brigitte Hart, Georgia Leigh-Münster, Hannah Kemp-Welch, Karen Werner, Kate Donovan, Lisa Hall, Maria Papadomanolaki, Meira Asher and Sally Applin. 

www.shortwavecollective.net

Irene Revell (chair) is a writer and curator who works with artists across sound, text, performance and moving image. She is an RCA Postdoctoral Researcher on Aura Satz’s Preemptive Listening project. With Sarah Shin she is editing a book on feminisms, sound and listening (Silver Press, 2024). Much of her curatorial work has been with Electra and she is closely involved with collections including Electra’s Her Noise Archive and Cinenova: Feminist Film and Video. She recently completed her doctoral thesis, Live Materials: Womens Work, Pauline Oliveros and the Feminist Performance Score at CRiSAP where she has been the affiliated curator/lecturer on the MA Sound Arts since 2014. 

TALK 

Friday 22 March | 2pm – 2.45pm | Clore Auditorium 

London College of Communication Sonic Screen Lab Artist Talk 

Martina (Judah) A t t i l l e  in conversation with Onyeka Igwe 

Martina (Judah) A t t i l l e is currently in the writing-up year of her practice-based PhD, Africandescence, at University of the Arts London. Attille is one of the founding members of the London-based collective Sankofa Film & Video (with Maureen Blackwood, Robert Crusz, Isaac Julien and Nadine Marsh-Edwards), initially working with the group to deliver public facing film discussions hosted by Cinema Action and 16mm film workshops for women hosted by Women in Sync and Four Corners, in response to the desire for change in the representation of Black people and black women in the media. Her PhD film installation, Africandescence Blue (2023) concludes Attille’s affection for the films of Sankofa Film & Video, including Territories I & II (Isaac Julien,1984), The Passion of Remembrance (Maureen Blackwood/Isaac Julien, 1986), Dreaming Rivers (Attille, 1988) and the optimism they propose for a changed aesthetic in British filmmaking, expressed by an alliance of graduates in their twenties, supported by their enablers. 

Onyeka Igwe is a London born, and based, moving image artist and researcher. Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? Not to provide a rigid answer as such, but to pull apart the nuances of mutuality, co-existence, and multiplicity. Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial, and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task. She has had solo/duo shows at Bonington Gallery (2024), MoMA PS1, New York (2023), High Line, New York (2022), Mercer Union, Toronto (2021), Jerwood Arts, London (2019) and Trinity Square Video, London (2018). Her films have screened in numerous group shows and film festivals worldwide. Currently, she is Practitioner in Residence at the University of the Arts London and will participate in the group show Nigeria Imaginary in the national pavilion of Nigeria at the upcoming 60th Venice Biennial in 2024. She was awarded the New Cinema Award at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival 2019, a 2020 Arts Foundation Fellowship, the 2021 Foundwork Artist Prize and has been nominated for the 2022 Jarman Award and Max Mara Artist Prize for Women. 

PANEL 3

Friday 22 March | 3pm – 4.30pm | Clore Auditorium 

On the Devaluation of ‘Women’s Work’: Female-led resistance and creative practice in Palestine in the 1970s-1990s and its legacy today

Biographies 

Noor Abed is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. Her practice examines notions of choreography and the imaginary relationship of individuals, creating situations where social possibilities are both rehearsed and performed. Abed’s work has been screened and exhibited internationally at Anthology Film Archives, New York, Gabes Cinema Fen Film Festival, Tunisia, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, The New Wight Biennial, Los Angeles, Leonard & Bina Gallery, Montréal, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Ujazdowski Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, The Mosaic Rooms, London, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham and MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome. Abed is currently a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam 2022–24. @noor_abed

Hanan Awwad is an activist, poet and women’s rights advocate. In 1988, Dr Awwad founded the Palestinian section of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). In her role as chair of Palestinian PEN (part of PEN International), she has fought for freedom of speech and the protection of persecuted writers. She takes part every year in conferences all over the world addressing issues such as imperialism, conflict resolution, and the role of women in resistance struggles. During the outbreak of the First Intifada, together with her sisters and brother Riad Awwad, she co-created Intifada 1987, a cassette tape album which was seized by the Israeli military and banned for its revolutionary content, only to be rediscovered recently. 

Jumana Emil Abboud engages with personal and collective stories and mythologies, weaving folklore and contemporary tales in an integrated relationship that navigates themes of memory and dispossession. She is currently completing her practice-based PhD at Slade School, reactivating folkloric practice through collaborative and creative workshop methodologies; through storytelling performances, drawing and crafts; using such tools to rewrite the tales as a gesture of reclaim and reunion with water, and in order to situate our connectedness to story heritage once more. During the past two decades, Abboud’s work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including in the Casco Art Institute, Utrecht, Sharjah Biennale, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Venice Biennale and Istanbul Biennale, among many others. She has participated in art residencies, including Sakiya – Art/Science/Agriculture, Ein Qiniya; Delfina Foundation, London; Arts Initiative Tokyo; and Gästeatelier Krone, Aarau. Abboud lives and works in Jerusalem and London. @jumanasan

Ozlem Koksal (moderator) is a Senior Lecturer, Course Leader on the MA Film, Television and Moving Image and Co-Director of the CREAM Doctoral Programme at University of Westminster. Ozlem’s research focuses on the intersection between issues concerning race, ethnicity, minorities and displacement, and their representation in visual culture, especially in moving images. She is particularly interested in the tension between history and memory, practices of constructing, monumentalising and/or erasing past narratives, and the ways in which such tension is translated into the visual realm.

Nadia Yahlom is a PhD student at CREAM, Westminster, looking at hauntedness, supernatural life and the necropolitical between Palestine and the UK, whose research considers how both humans, artefacts and landscapes reverberate with colonial violence. Her work explores how spaces such as museums, state archives and other institutions reinforce colonial biopolitics in relation to the Palestinian living and dead, and asks how individuals and collectives can create materials which subvert these power regimes, preserve folk/oral histories and respond generatively to absence, particularly in the context of cultural erasure and unfolding genocide. Nadia is also a co-founder of Sarha Collective, an artists collective for experimental art forms from Palestine and the broader SWANA region. @sarhacollective

Zeinab Shaath is a singer-songwriter from Gaza. More than 50 years ago, she recorded a set of revolutionary folk music — the first English-language songs to introduce the Palestinian cause to the wider world. Inspired by Vietnam-era protest music from Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, ‘The Urgent Call of Palestine’ was intended to share the stories and messages of Palestinian resistance with an international audience. In 1973, Shaath was immortalised in a film shot by exiled Palestinian artist Ismail Shammout in the mountains of Lebanon. Shaath went on to perform across three continents, carrying her message to young people across the world. 

ROUNDTABLE

Friday 22 March | 4.45pm – 6.15pm | Clore Auditorium 

Contemporary Resonances: futures for feminist moving image, performance and sound 

To conclude the first day of the conference, we invite some prominent cultural figures working in their fields to reflect on how moving image, performance and sound are currently being curated, archived, commissioned, and practiced. 

Biographies

May Adadol Ingawanij | เม อาดาดล อิงคะวณิช is a writer, curator, and teacher, Professor of Cinematic Arts and Co-director of the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media, University of Westminster. She publishes in English, Thai, and in translation, across a wide range of academic and arts publications. Her recent and ongoing curatorial projects include Animistic Apparatus, Legacies, 69^th Flaherty Film Seminar – To Commune (co-curated with Julian Ross).

Karen Alexander is an independent film and moving image curator, writer and researcher. She has worked with the BFI and the RCA, working across media, arts and culture. Her research areas are black women and representation, national identity and collective memory. Recent projects include ‘Curating Conversations’ (2014 & 2015), ‘Black Atlantic Cinema Club’ (Autograph, Watershed 2016), and exhibitions ‘Whip it Good: Spinning from History’s Filth Mind’ (Autograph, 2015) ‘Dream Time: We All have Stories’ (Nuit Blanche, Toronto 2018). In 2017 Karen co-founded the commissioning platform Philomena’s Chorus. She is currently a tutor at UAL and a consultatnt with Cinema Rediscovered in Bristol.

Cinenova is a volunteer-run organisation preserving and distributing the work of feminist film and video makers. Cinenova was founded in 1991 following the merger of two feminist film and video distributors, Circles and Cinema of Women, each formed in 1979. Cinenova currently distributes over 300 titles that include artists’ moving image, experimental film, narrative feature films, documentary and educational videos made from the 1910’s to the early 2000’s. The thematics in these titles include oppositional histories, post and de-colonial struggles, representation of gender, race, sexuality, and other questions of difference and importantly the relations and alliances between these different struggles. Cinenova offers access to an extensive archive and advice relating to moving image work directed by makers who identify as womxn, transgender, gender non-conforming and gender non–binary. Cinenova is informed by its history as a key resource in the UK independent film distribution sector and internationally. The Cinenova Working Group, founded in 2010, oversees the ongoing work of preservation and distribution, as well as special projects that seek to question the conditions of the organisation. Current Working Group: Tracey Francis, Emma Hedditch, Charlotte Procter, Irene Revell, Moira Salt, Louise Shelley and Marina Vishmidt.

susan pui san lok < > susan, lok pui san is an artist, writer and academic based in London. Group exhibitions include Found Cities, Lost Objects curated by Lubaina Himid OBE (Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Southampton City Art Gallery, Bristol, Royal West of England Gallery, Leeds Art Gallery, 2023-24); and Diaspora Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017). Recent projects include REWIND/REPLAY, a major commission for Rewinding Internationalism for Villa Arson, Van Abbemuseum, and Netwerk Aalst (2022-23); and Centenary, commissioned by Create London for the Becontree Centenary (2022) and recently installed at ESEA Contemporary (2023). Solo exhibitions include seven x seven, curated by Mother Tongue for Glasgow International Festival (2021); A COVEN A GROVE A STAND, commissioned for New Geographies (Firstsite, 2019). She is a Professor in Contemporary Art and Director of the UAL Decolonising Arts Institute, where she currently leads the AHRC project, Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation and Heritage, and the 20/20 project (supported by Arts Council England, Freelands Foundation and UAL). spsl-projects.net

Aura Satz’s work encompasses film, sound, performance and sculpture. She has performed, exhibited and screened her work in venues such as Tate Modern, BFI Southbank, the New York Film Festival, Tate Britain, Hayward Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, Sydney Biennale, NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo, High Line Art NY, the Rotterdam Film Festival, MoMA NY, Sharjah Art Foundation, Kadist San Francisco, Onassis Stegi, Amant NY and Walker Arts Centre. She has presented solo exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection, London; the Hayward Gallery project space, London; John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; Dallas Contemporary, Texas; George Eastman Museum, Rochester; ARTIUM, Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo; Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo; and Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, Auckland. She recently completed a sound-centred feature film on sirens and emergency listening, titled ‘Preemptive Listening’.

Linsey Young is currently Curator Contemporary British Art at Tate where she works across the contemporary programme. Recent projects include Women in Revolt! Art and Activism 1970 – 1990, Turner Prize 2018 and Anthea Hamilton: The Squash, 2018. In 2019 Young Curated Charlie Prodger’s Scotland and Venice presentation with Cove Park.

PANEL 4

Saturday 23 March | 9.30am – 11am | Clore Auditorium

Radical alchemy: alternative imaginaries and feminist encounter 

‘ “At first I was afraid, I was petrified”: Working-Class Witches and Social Surrealism in Amber Collective’s Dream On (1991)’ 

Jennifer Jasmine White (University of Manchester) 

Dream On (1991) by Amber Collective is a social cinematic project that uses fantasy, surrealism, and most interestingly, the occult, to explore working-class feminist experimentation. Accusations of middle-class tourism have long haunted the women’s movement and its economically conscious art, whilst working-class cultural production has too often been understood exclusively within the bounds of ‘gritty’, hyper-masculine realism. As a result, the working-class woman’s experiment is woefully neglected. From levitating barmaids to dinner in the forest with a giant swan, Dream On takes working-class women’s struggles (from debt and work to disordered eating and sexual trauma) and explores them through a facilitating focus on the occult. In implicitly framing its protagonists as giggling witches, it draws on a historical relationship between working-class women and the supernatural. In this, it also gestures to the radical epistemological shifts that must occur in order for working-class women’s inner lives to be made visible. 

Though James Leggott has suggested Dream On fits ‘comfortably within the tradition of British social realist cinema’, my paper understands it as an urgent subversion, a bewitching possession of kitchen-sink realism, wherein unexplained phenomena pave the way for imaginative consciousness raising pursuits. In the absence of established forms through which working-class women might hope, dream, and organise in Thatcher’s Britain, occult happenings blend with pop music and women’s darts, enabling the otherwise unthinkable. 

Jennifer Jasmine White is a fully funded PhD candidate at the University of Manchester, researching the relationship between working-class women and experimental forms. This research explores the construction of a working-class subjectivity, with a particular focus on the surreal or fantastic, in the work of authors and artists such as Ann Quin, Sarah Lucas, and Shelagh Delaney. Jennifer completed her undergraduate degree at Homerton College, Cambridge and an MSt at Hertford College, Oxford, which was fully funded by the Oxford English faculty. She is a first-generation student from the north-west of England. You can find more of her work and writing at www.jenniferjasminewhite.com.

‘The “Transatlantic Intimacies” of Post-Punk Feminism’ 

Maria Elena Buszek (University of Colorado Denver, USA) 

Richard T. Rodriguez’s 2022 book A Kiss Across the Ocean thoughtfully explores what he calls the ‘transatlantic intimacies of British post-punk and US Latinidad.’ While Rodriguez touches only briefly upon the subject, these often politically charged connections overlapped with the concerns of feminist artists and musicians from these same scenes. As Rachel Garfield writes in the Women in Revolt! catalogue, ‘the after-effects of punk itself opened up for women new ways of looking at the world.’ To this, I would add that punk opened new ways of navigating the world, building new feminist communities in the process.

Women in Revolt! artists such as Gina Birch, Vivienne Dick, Jill Posener, Poly Styrene, and Gee Vaucher had crucial creative connections to the US, as American artists like Lydia Lunch, Ann Magnuson, Judy Nylon, and Vermillion did to the UK. The regions’ intertwined, but distinct discourses around gender, sexuality, class, race, and popular culture were frequently analysed and represented in their art and music – often with the shared goal of critiquing and evolving the second-wave feminist discourses they’d inherited. This paper will address the various ‘transatlantic intimacies’ of artists like these, with a focus upon the feminist politics of their work, collaborations, and friendships. 

Maria Elena Buszek Ph.D. is a scholar, critic, curator, and Professor of Art History at the University of Colorado Denver, where she teaches courses on Modern and contemporary art. Her recent publications include the books Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2006) and Extra/ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (Duke University Press, 2011), and the anthologies Punkademics: The Basement Show in the Ivory Tower (AK Press, 2012) and Design History Beyond the Canon (Bloomsbury, 2019); catalogue essays for numerous international exhibitions; and articles and criticism in such journals as Flash Art and TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies. With Hilary Robinson, she edited the 2019 anthology of new writing, A Companion to Feminist Art (Wiley). Her current book project, Art of Noise, explores the ties between contemporary feminist art and popular music. 

‘Radical performativity in the art of Anne Bean’ 

Rebecca Binns (London College of Communication, University of the Arts London) 

This paper explores how Anne Bean’s performances in the 1970s intersected with feminist and punk practice. Bean’s bold encounters with the elements, as captured in the series of photos featured in the Women in Revolt exhibition, Heat (1974-77) and Shouting Mortality as I Drown (1977, original performance in 1973), form the core of the presentation, highlighting the transgressive aspect of her work. As the performances were, by definition, transitory, the importance of their documentation through photos, videos, and flyers is examined, along with the impact of reworking and defacing them. Her performances as Anne-Archy with the music and theatrical group The Moodies (formerly known as Moody and the Menstruators) (1971), which pushed boundaries by being an outré all-female (and one gay male pianist) act, are also featured. Their work inspired the all-female punk band The Slits among others, who collectively embraced failure as a form of creative resistance. The ephemerality of Bean’s work, along with a reluctance to court art-world acclaim, offer indications of why this artist has been relatively overlooked, despite her importance. Forming an alternative to an art establishment endorsed career, her approach was paralleled in the women’s movement. However, even though performance was an essential strand of feminist art in the 1970s, Bean resisted any affiliation with this movement, perceiving it as constrained by gender and it was only later, retrospectively, that she embraced the term. This ambiguity, echoed among the punk women that followed her, is unpacked through the presentation. 

Dr Rebecca Binns wrote the first ever monograph on the work of the artist and designer, Gee Vaucher, titled, Gee Vaucher: Beyond Punk, Feminism, and the Avant-Garde (Manchester University Press, 2022). She has published widely and is currently working on a research project on Rock Against Racism. She works as a lecturer on critical theory for art and design BA students at London College of Communication (University of the Arts, London). Previously, she worked as news writer for Source Photographic Review and was a set designer and builder for theatres and nightclubs.

‘Sociality of the Spectacle: The Present Potential of Feminist Performance’ 

Amy Tobin (University of Cambridge) 

This paper returns to, and aims to rethink, the critique of spectacle among politicised women artists and feminists in the 1970s. Taking the interdisciplinary collaborations of Rose English and Sally Potter – as well their works made with other friends and interlocutors – as a starting point, I argue for an alternate repository of spectacular culture that artists drew on in their search for revolutionary form. This was not the situationist spectacle of advertising image culture, but the cultures of performance and costuming that had calibrated gendered, classed and racialised experience over centuries, and which English and Potter deconstructed and remade. Focusing on their spectacular performance Berlin (1976) – which took place between their squatted residence on Mornington Terrace, an ice rink, and a swimming pool, and was animated by references to consciousness-raising, mythic archetypes, 1930s cabarets, film noir, ice dancing and vaudeville – I suggest that English and Potter were both interrogating cultural materials and retrieving them for latent revolutionary potential.

Amy Tobin is associate professor in the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge and curator, contemporary programmes, Kettle’s Yard. She is a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. Her book Women Artists Together: Art in the Age of Women’s Liberation was published by Yale University Press in 2023, and she contributed an essay to the exhibition catalogue accompanying Women in Revolt!. 

Rachel Garfield (chair) is an artist, writer and Professor in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art. Garfield was Principal Investigator (2018-22) on the AHRC-funded, The Legacies of Stephen Dwoskin’s Personal Cinema. She is co-editor of Dwoskino: The Gaze of Stephen Dwoskin (LUX, 2022), shortlisted for the Kraszna-Krausz award and author of Experimental Film making and Punk: Feminist Audio-Visual Culture of the 1970s and 1980s (Bloomsbury, 2022) , and also co-commissioning editor of the Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ). Garfield exhibits her videos in galleries and screenings, most recently at Beaconsfield Gallery, The London Short Film Festival, ICA, Swedenborg Rooms (London), Designathon 2023 (Zurich), and Hugh Lane Gallery (Dublin). 

PANEL 5

Saturday 23 March | 11.15am – 12.45pm | Clore Auditorium 

Performance activating protest 

‘ “And So They Laughed…” ’

Sehr Jalil (Goldsmiths, University of London / National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan)

Colonial, religious, or nationalist movements have instigated revolts in women, particularly in the aftermath and colossal absorption of slow violence and voluntary silences for aeons. The Women’s Action Forum (WAF) revolted and responded to a dictatorship (1979) where misogynistic versions of Shariah law were crafted for/towards women. The Women Artists/Activists of Lahore, Pakistan, burnt their dupattas (veils/shawls) in a public square, wrote a manifesto to assert and establish basic human rights for women in Pakistan using satire and humour when interjecting in various forms of media. One of the core members /activists of this movement, Dr Salima Hashmi, has outlined how ‘Humour was crucial. In some way, we had to play a story similar to the “Emperor’s New Clothes”, we pretended and almost believed that the powerful were invisible, imagining that, made laughter instrumental.’ 

As a woman artist and researcher from Lahore, Pakistan, working on and pursuing my PhD in London, I enter this revolt to initiate a dialogue, a continuation of the satire and humour used in works by women artists from the 1970s and 1980s to now. My presentation, a form of video essay, aims to engage in performative and critical dialogue using archives/excerpts from the ASR Resource Centre, clips from Hashmi’s satirical performances, aired on Pakistan Television during the 1970s and 80s, along images and extracts from works by contemporary artists from Pakistan. 

Sehr Jalil is a multidisciplinary visual artist/researcher. She works with ideas and issues of memory, archive, intergenerational relationships, race, class, and post-colonial identity politics. She’s a doctoral candidate at Goldsmiths, Department of Visual Cultures, University of London and a Lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies, National College of Arts, Lahore. She is currently based in London and on leave for her PhD. 

‘Performance and video art in Portugal: access to public space in the post-dictatorship period and the conquest of female emancipation’ 

Paula Parente Pinto and Vera Carmo (Independent researchers) 

In the transformative period of the Portuguese revolution of 1974, performance art allowed women to embody their emancipatory fights in direct interventions in public space. In a patriarchal society where gaining access to vote was not enough to defend women’s rights, the role developed by women in performance was decisive for the exposure of a socially, culturally, and politically backward mentality. British artist Shirley Cameron first performed in public spaces in Portugal before the political revolution of April 1974 and returned in the upcoming years to perform at festivals where many female artists started performing, such as ORLAN, Natascha Fiala, Chantal Gyot, Suzanne Krist, Elisabete Mileu, Catherine Meziat, Lydia Schouten, Ção Pestana, Marie Kawazu, Clara Menéres, Ana Hatherly, Delphine Seyrig, and Elisabeth Morcellet, among many others. With the intent of participating in the revolution, many female artists who performed at international festivals in decentralized regions of Portugal after 1974, showed that freedom was not the easiest thing to offer. The (often) unreleased recordings, documenting their performances and video art works, are a testament to women’s fights in the face of adversity, capturing moments of resistance and defiance. This presentation explores how performance and the medium of video enabled these pioneering women artists to amplify their voices against patriarchal oppression, and how their legacy opens new opportunities to think about the politics of art in contemporary feminist art practices. 

Paula Pinto is an independent researcher, producer, and curator. She completed a PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, New York (2016), graduated in Fine Arts-Sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Porto, and obtained a master’s degree in Urban Culture from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. She works on disciplinary intersections between dance, photography, visual arts, film/video and performance, and is particularly interested in artists’ archives, art critics and cultural institutions. She has published several books and since 2020 has been running the Performing the Archive project: performingthearchive.com. 

Vera Carmo is a curator and researcher. A PhD candidate at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Porto University (FBAUP), they hold a masters in Curatorial Studies and a degree in Sculpture. Currently teaching at University of Maia (UMAIA), her recent work has focused on the history of the moving image. Between 2019 and 2020 she was a researcher for the project CineVideoArt, a catalogue of films and videos by Portuguese artists. Her curatorial projects include What do U Want 4 Xmas? (Rampa, Porto, 2020-2021), Transubstanciação (Poste Vídeo-Arte, Porto, 2020-2022) and she co-curated Guerrilla Shout- Out! Alice Neel’s Graphic Archive (Rampa, Porto, 2022). 

‘Brides and Madonnas against the Bomb: Feminist activist art practices towards nuclear disarmament and more’ 

Alexandra Kokoli (Middlesex University London / University of Johannesburg) 

This paper examines the performance and socially engaged practice of Sister Seven, a group of artists and poets including Gillian Allnutt, Shirley Cameron, Mary Michaels Monica Ross, and Evelyn Silver. Between 1981 and 1984, Sister Seven produced over 20 posters for nuclear disarmament from feminist perspectives, which were exhibited at a range of established and non-traditional venues as well as art galleries and colleges. Delving into the intersections of the individual and collaborative practices of members of Sister Seven and the performative dimension of the posters, discussion will consider example posters alongside performances by Cameron and Silver, such as The Virgin Mary Society (VMS) and Brides Against the Bomb (BAB). The posters and Cameron and Silver’s performance practice adopt styles of antithetical affective charges, with the former often opting for pacifist solemnity and the latter for satirical irreverence. Focusing on BAB (which developed out of the earlier performance I Married Charles, You can too!) and VMS (which targeted the pious maternalism of women’s pacifism before Greenham), I explore the role of feminist countercultural iconoclasm in transforming the apparently single cause of nuclear disarmament to a call for a different life on earth, beyond extractivist heteropatriarchy. 

Dr. Alexandra Kokoli researches feminist artistic and activist practices. She works as Associate Professor in Visual Culture at Middlesex University and as Research Associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg. She has published widely, including the edited collections Feminism Reframed (Cambridge Scholars, 2007), Susan Hiller: The Provisional Texture of Reality (co-edited with Deborah Cherry, JRP Ringier / les presses du reel, 2008), Art into Life: Essays on Tracey Emin (Bloomsbury, 2020), and the monograph The Feminist Uncanny (Bloomsbury, 2016). She co-leads the Transnational Early Career Research Network (TECReN) in Visual and Performing Arts, funded by the British Academy. Her research on Greenham Common has been supported by the Paul Mellon Centre and the Leverhulme Trust. 

‘Resilient Voices: Kurdish Women’s Performance Practices from Contemporary Turkey’ 

Ceren Özpınar (University of Brighton)

It was not until the early 2010s that Kurdish artists were acknowledged in Turkey’s art world. This delayed recognition played a role was important in dispelling the perception that their identities and works were inconsequential. Jujin’s 1998 performance, Sere Mehe (Kurdish for ‘period’) was a significant turning point in the critical portrayal of Kurdish identity through art. It paved the way for subsequent artists to actively question the social and political limitations placed upon them. The performance involved Jujin staging a public art event naked while having her period. The artist integrated her gender, sexual, and racial identities, foregrounding herself as both a (cis)woman and a Kurdish subject, using a performative strategy aimed at challenging the heteronormative patriarchal hierarchies of nationalism. This paper will explore the performance practices of Kurdish women from Turkey, following a trajectory that begins with Jujin’s groundbreaking performance in 1998 and extending to recent works by Mehtap Baydu (b.1972), Zehra Dogan (b.1989), and Fatos Irwen (b.1977). Through a critical analysis of their performances, this paper will examine the intersectionality of art, identity, and activism in the context of Kurdish women’s experiences from contemporary Turkey. 

Dr Ceren Özpınar is a Senior Lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Brighton. She specialises in modern and contemporary art from Turkey, the Middle East, and their diasporas. She is the co-editor of Under the Skin: Feminist Art and Art Histories from the Middle East and North Africa Today (Oxford University Press, 2020), and the author of Art Historiography in Turkey (1970–2010) (Tarih Vakfi, 2016). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Image & Text and Third Text. Her next monograph, which focuses on art, feminism, and community in Turkey, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2024. 

Hilary Robinson (chair) is Professor of Feminism, Art, and Theory and Director of the Centre for Doctoral Training: Feminism, Sexual Politics, and Visual Culture at Loughborough University. She was granted the Award for Distinction in Feminist Scholarship, College Art Association, 2024. She is PI for the AHRC/IRC-funded Feminist Art Making Histories (2021-2024). Trained as a painter, her PhD was with Griselda Pollock. She was previously: Professor of Politics of Art; Head of School, Art & Design, Ulster University; Dean, College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon University, USA; and Dean, Art and Design, Middlesex University. Publications include: Reading Art, Reading Irigaray(IB Taurus, 2006); Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology 1968-2014 (ed., Wiley, 2015); Art of Feminism (co-author, Chronicle/Tate, 2018); and a Companion to Feminist Art (co-ed., Wiley, 2019). 

PANEL 6 

Saturday 23 March | 1.30pm – 3pm | Clore Auditorium 

Showing the Work: Feminist archival practice and exhibition 

‘Time Machine: The Creative Genealogy of the Rita Keegan Heritage Project’ 

Rita Keegan Heritage Foundation 

This presentation traces the creative genealogy of the Rita Keegan Heritage Project and the many years of grassroots collaboration that have enabled the presentation of Keegan’s work for Women in Revolt. It will explore themes within Keegan’s archival materials and artworks, such as the importance of creative kinship networks, the story of British Black Arts and archiving as activism. We share strategies for nurturing relationships across generations that allow artworks and archives to live and breathe, offering new opportunities to grasp historical contexts, our presents, and futures.

Rita Keegan works collaboratively in the studio supported by Lauren Craig, Gina Nembhard, and Naomi Pearce. Projects include a solo exhibition at South London Gallery (2021) and forthcoming commission for Art on the Underground (2024). Following the deposit of Keegan’s personal papers at the Women’s Art Library, Special Collections, Goldsmiths, University of London (co-ordinated by Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski), the group are working to form the Rita Keegan Heritage Foundation, which is currently awaiting charitable status.

‘ “Hidden Energy”: Feminist support structures in production, distribution, and preservation’ 

Charlotte Procter (LUX & Cinenova) 

The challenges associated with preserving and distributing feminist film and video in the UK are intricate and multifaceted. Some of these complexities arise from the fact that these works are often produced by community organisers, activists, and students, and therefore exist outside of traditional circulation networks and collections. Through case studies of 1970s and 1980s film and video works that both document and offer testimonies to feminist organising and collective production, this talk will explore the tangible difficulties and implications associated with preserving these works and their presentation in contemporary contexts. 

Charlotte Procter is an archivist, curator, and collection and archive director at LUX. In 2013 she joined the Cinenova Working Group, a collective formed to preserve and promote the Cinenova feminist film and video collection. She has collaborated on international research, preservation, and curatorial projects, including the Cinenova project The Work We Share (2021-24), a retrospective of U.S avant-garde filmmaker Betzy Bromberg (2022), and co-edited Living on Air: the films and words of Sandra Lahire (2021).

‘Showing Up, Again’ 

Radclyffe Hall 

Our encounters with recent histories of feminist documentary cultures are often ad hoc. Sometimes materials are held in archives but more often they are cared for in domestic settings, the homes of the photographers who made them or the friends who continue to look after them. Alongside these collections, images are dispersed through contemporary printed contexts, found in libraries and archives, or bought from second-hand book vendors. Through the work of three photographers practising in London in the 1980s – Tessa Boffin, Ingrid Pollard, and Jill Posener – this presentation focuses on circulation as a strategy of display in the contemporary representation of feminist documentary practice. 

Radclyffe Hall is a concomitant group of artists and writers dedicated to exploring culture, aesthetics, and learning, through the lens of contemporary feminism. With no fixed membership or base, Radclyffe has collaborated with artists on exhibitions, events and screenings including Deep Down Body Thirst for Glasgow International 2018 and Hot Moment: Tessa Boffin, Jill Posener and Ingrid Pollard at Auto Italia in 2020. 

‘ “ [..] a good lesson in accepting a duet for what it is” ’ 

Karen Di Franco (Glasgow School of Art / Chelsea College of Arts) 

What is at stake in the exhibition of textual materials, scores, instructions, publications and other ephemera? At a time when archival materials are increasingly present in international exhibition-making – not least in Women In Revolt! – is it possible to gesture towards not only the liveness of such materials but the social materiality of their iterative and enfolding live or performed contexts? Specifically concerned with (feminist) works that blur the distinction between the archive and the art collection, this contribution will consider examples of collaborative curatorial approaches that complicate narratives – to position that it is a not a matter of finding ways to ‘fit’ such practices into institutions but rather of listening to the re-imagining of institutions that such works themselves imply. 

Dr Karen Di Franco is a curator and writer, working in the fields of exhibition making and art historical research. She specialises in post-1960s feminist art practice and artists’ publishing, alongside the contexts of iteration, fiction writing and performance as points of enquiry in her work. She is Programme Leader of MLitt Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art) at Glasgow School of Art and Programme Curator at Chelsea Space, Chelsea College of Arts, UAL @archivist23. 

Catherine Grant (chair) is Reader in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She is the author of A Time of One’s Own: histories of feminism in contemporary art (Duke University Press, 2022), and co-editor of Fandom as Methodology (Goldsmiths University Press, 2019), Creative Writing and Art History (Wiley, 2012), and the questionnaire on ‘Decolonizing Art History’ (Art History, 2020). She is a co-lead of two research networks: ‘Group Work: Contemporary Art and Feminism’ and ‘Animating Archives’.

PANEL 7

Saturday 23 March | 3.15pm – 4.30pm | Clore Auditorium 

Community-Building Filmmaking 

‘Women’s Uprising and the Feminist Film Collectives of Latin America’ 

Lorena Cervera (Arts University Bournemouth)

In the 1970s and 1980s, several feminist film collectives emerged across Latin America, including Cine Mujer in Mexico (1975–1986) and Colombia (1978–1999), the Venezuelan Grupo Feminista Miércoles (1979–1988), the Brazilian Lilith Video (1983–1987), the Uruguayan Girasolas (1988–1993), and the Peruvian Warmi Cine y Video (1989–1998). Their films and videos disrupted the representations of women on screen, challenged women’s seclusion from the public sphere, and both fuelled and documented feminist campaigns and events. This paper offers an overview of these collectives and positions them as part of an overlooked uprising whose importance resonates to this day.

Lorena Cervera is a filmmaker and writer from a working-class background. She works as Senior Lecturer in Film Production at AUB and holds a PhD in Film Studies from UCL. Her research has been published in journals such as Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, Feminist Media Studies, and Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media. Her first monograph, A Feminist Counter-History of Latin American Documentary, will be published by Routledge in 2025. As a filmmaker, she has directed Pilas (2019) and co-directed #PrecarityStory (2020). Currently, she is developing the transmedia project Processing Images from Caracas. 

‘The Women’s Liberation Movement is a Lesbian Plot – the videotapes of Norma Bahia Pontes and Rita Moreira in the early 1970s’ 

Livia Perez (University of California, Santa Cruz) 

In the early 1970s, Brazilian video makers Norma Bahia Pontes and Rita Moreira created a series of documentaries framing the lesbian community in New York. Lesbian Mothers (1972), Lesbianism Feminism (1974), She Has a Beard(1975) and The Apartment (1975) broadened the representations of the lesbian community and its struggles, questioning the politics of appearances, fearlessly depicting lesbian sex on screen and, above all, offering an intersectional vision from the perspective of two Latin American feminists and immigrant artists. This paper explores their trajectory, the interweaving connections with the French feminist movement, the Women for Women Festival, and the media collective C.L.I.T. 

Livia Perez is a feminist Brazilian media scholar and filmmaker. She works as a Lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her moving-image practice and research spans feminist, queer, and diasporic media history. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Sao Paulo and an MFA in Digital Arts and New Media from UC Santa Cruz, mentored by Isaac Julien and Mark Nash. The films she directed and produced have been screened at Sundance, Locarno, Havana, IDFA, Frameline, It’s All True and Hot Docs. She is currently developing her next feature film, Finding Norma. 

‘Inter-Generational/Disciplinary/Class Film Communities: The Process Activated by María Barea’s Films’ 

Isabel Seguí (University of St Andrews) 

After decades of critical neglect, the films by María Barea (Chancay, Peru, 1943) are enjoying a revival. Recently, they have been recirculated in Peru and featured in key international feminist cinematic events, such as No Master Territories (2022) and Feminist Elsewheres (2023). This all-encompassing process (including preservation, restitution, and archival activation) is led by a collective of scholars, archivists, and activists, with the crucial participation of the filmmaker. The interdisciplinary and intergenerational group is inspired by Barea’s way of understanding filmmaking as a way of life and a community-making device useful for present-day practitioners, researchers, and publics. 

Isabel Seguí is a lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews (Scotland). She specializes in women-led nonfiction filmmaking in Peru and Bolivia and non-director-centric feminist approaches to film and video production. She is one of the founders of RAMA (Latin American Women’s Audiovisual Research Network). Her research has been published in numerous academic outlets in Europe and the Americas and funded, among others, by the Leverhulme Trust. 

Rosie Thomas (chair) is Professor of Film and Co-Director of the Chevening South Asia Journalism Programme at the University of Westminster. She set up and ran CREAM (Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media) between 2003–2017. Following her pioneering 1980s field research on the Bombay film industry, she has published widely on Indian cinema history. Throughout the 1990s she produced documentaries, arts and current affairs programmes for Channel Four. She is currently completing the AHRC project Documentary of the Imagination. Rosie is co-founder and co-editor of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies and author of Bombay before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies (State University of New York Press, 2013).

PANEL 8 

Saturday 23 March | 5pm – 6.30pm | Clore Auditorium 

Devolved screens: alternative approaches, changing content 

‘Film as Entertainment and Political Tool: The London Women’s Film Group’ 

Barbara Evans (York University, Toronto, Canada) 

In the early 1970s, the London Women’s Film Group was born in response to the urgently felt need to put women’s stories, told by women, on the screen in the seemingly impenetrable male-dominated film industry and culture of the time. Initially brought together by filmmaker Midge Mackenzie, one of the rare women writers and directors of the era, the group was made up of diverse and dedicated practitioners and theorists, including Claire Johnston, Susan Shapiro, Esther Ronay, Francine Winham, Fran McLean, and Linda Dove and others who joined along the way. In addition to Johnston, the group was strongly influenced by feminist theorists like Pam Cook and Laura Mulvey and was involved in helping Johnston mount the first season of women’s films at the National Film Theatre in London. The members produced a number of films, both individually and collectively, including Women of the Rhondda, Betteshanger Kent, Put Yourself In My Place, The Amazing Equal Pay Show, and Whose Choice? The group and its work provided inspiration not only to one another but also to other women who felt the lack of feminist expression in film. 

Barbara Evans is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts at York University in Toronto where she teaches documentary history and production. A graduate of the University of British Columbia and the National Film and Television School (UK), she is an award-winning filmmaker and was a founding member of the London Women’s Film Group and the British Newsreel Collective. She is currently completing a book, Invisible Griersonians, on early women documentary filmmakers as well as a documentary film, Bee Queens: Collaborating with the Hive, on women artists and the environment.

https://ampd.yorku.ca/profile/barbara-evans/

‘Seeing for Ourselves: Women and Artists’ Film on Channel 4, 1982–1992’ 

Nicole Atkinson (Birkbeck, University of London / LUX) 

On the 8 November 1982, a week after Channel 4’s first transmission, Ann Guedes of Cinema Action opened the inaugural Eleventh Hour slot with So That You Can Live (1981), an anti-Thatcher film that follows a strike for women’s equal pay in the Welsh village of Treforest. This broadcast marked the beginning of new opportunities for women artists to produce, create, and broadcast their work on British television. 

Over 60 women created moving image works that were affiliated with Channel 4 between the years of 1982–1992. The channel offered a unique exhibition opportunity on broadcast television for women who were often ignored by major contemporary art spaces. Exploring themes of motherhood, voyeurism, race, sexuality, and gender, many of these artists pursued the personal, often drawing on their own experience of what it means to be a woman, and subsequently criticising the representation of women in mass media and dominant art practices. Despite this support, women’s artists’ film practice remains largely excluded from Channel 4 histories and scholarship. This paper outlines some of the ways in which Channel 4 offered a platform of exhibition for women’s artists’ film and moving image, and how we remember (or in some cases don’t) these works today.

Nicole Atkinson is a second year PhD candidate, completing a CHASE/AHRC funded Collaborative Doctoral Award at Birkbeck, University of London, and LUX, exploring the corpus of 350+ moving image and artists’ films affiliated with Channel 4 between the years of 1982–1992. Through researching the commissioning of artists’ film and moving image and enriching this largely ignored history, this practice-based project aims to animate the archival material and moving image works through curatorial practice. Prior to this, she worked for arts organisations including Clore Leadership, Bloomsbury Festival, and the 65th BFI London Film Festival. 

‘Women in Revolt: Exploring solidarities and the exchange of labour between filmmakers through the production of Noski Deville’s Loss of Heat (UK, 1994, 20mins)’ 

Beth Bramich (University of the Arts London / Arts University Bournemouth) 

Noski Deville’s film Loss of Heat (UK, 1994, 20mins) challenges preconceived notions of white, ableist heteronormativity by centering queer love between Asian women, and lived experience of disability epilepsy. Propagated by legacies of Thatcherite ideologies driving censorship, division and erasure of marginalised identities, access to such complex portrayals of queer life remains limited. In this paper, I will develop thoughts and reflections through additional material gathered around an interview with Deville towards a study of the necessity of collective production outside of mainstream media, identifying radical acts of solidarity between filmmakers who explore boundaries and intersections — emotional, physical, visible, invisible, care, dependence, queerness, race, ethnicity, disability. 

Beth Bramich is a writer and researcher. She is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Camberwell College of Art, University of the Arts London, and an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins (UAL) and the Arts University Bournemouth. She is part of London-based, queer-led, all-genders F*Choir and the working group for the Feminist Duration Reading Group (currently in residence at Goldsmiths CCA), and holds an MA in Critical Writing in Art and Design from the Royal College of Art. 

www.bethbramich.com

‘Working Together – The Collective Practices and Feminist Collaborations of the 1980s Black Workshops’ 

Jessica Boyall (Royal Holloway University of London) 

In 1984, Martina Attille of Sankofa Film and Video Collective appeared on an episode of the television series ‘Pictures of Women’ which, broadcast by Channel 4, was produced by an all-women collective of the same name. According to POW’s founding member, Karen Alexander, the programme’s agenda was unambiguously feminist: it interrogated ‘certain issues around female sexuality’ vis-à-vis ‘feminist analysis’ (Alexander 1984: 18). Yet rather than being structured around the programme’s overarching theme – the sexualisation of women in advertisements – this particular episode was steered, instead, by Attille’s candid declaration of fears for her own safety, leading to the remaining contributors either empathising with or enlarging upon the filmmaker’s ‘worries’ about threats of male violence. 

This paper takes Attille’s participation in POW as its point of departure in two senses. First, it explores how she, alongside the other members of Sankofa, Ceddo Film and Video Workshop, and the Black Audio Film Collective, forged women-centred networks, and feminist forums beyond their immediate mixed-gender collectives. This included collaborating with artists and thinkers such as Sonia Boyce, bell hooks, June Givanni and Coco Fusco and establishing community-facing initiatives such as the Black Women and Representation Workshop series at Four Corners Gallery in London. Second, it investigates how these feminist infrastructures shaped the Workshops’ formal approaches and thematic concerns through a focus on representations of police brutality and political resistance. Despite being primarily linked to male figures, the Workshops’ filmmaking constitutes an alternative feminist practice that places Black female experience, identity and activism at its core. 

Jessica Boyall is a PhD candidate in the department of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she also teaches. Funded by the AHRC, her research focuses on collective practice, feminism and race in the context of 1980s British art and film history. Her writing has appeared in various publications, including the New Left Review, Third Text and The Guardian, and she has held research positions at the Victorian Albert and Design Museum in London. 

Lauren Houlton (chair) is a Techne-funded doctoral researcher at the University of Westminster where she is developing a project on feminist collaboration in artist’s filmmaking. She is currently Assistant Editor for the Moving Image Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ) and was the 2022-23 co-convenor of the Paul Mellon Centre’s Doctoral Researchers Network. In 2017 she was awarded the Michael O’Pray Prize for new writing on artist’s moving image.  

PARALLEL EXHIBITION

Thursday 21 March – Saturday 23 March | Chelsea Space 

Improvising Antiphony: The Lindsay Cooper Archive  

Curated by students on the MA Curating and Collections, Chelsea College of Arts (UAL)

Opening reception (free to all), 6pm – 8.30pm (introductions, 7pm)

Exhibition continues

Friday 22 March, 12pm – 8pm 

Saturday 23 March, 11am – 5pm 

Chelsea Space 

Chelsea College of Arts, UAL | 16 John Islip Street | London SW1P 4JU

www.chelseaspace.org | @chelseaspace

Improvising Antiphony, hosted at Chelsea Space and curated by students of MA Curating and Collections at Chelsea College of Arts, UAL, celebrates the work and wider influence of the experimental musician, Lindsay Cooper. By exploring her use of improvisation to create opportunities for antiphonal exchange between performers and audiences, this archival display examines collaborative practice in sonic and feminist movements. 

Drawing on the spirit of improvisation, Improvising Antiphony encourages visitors to listen, feel and respond to a generation of women’s sounds influenced by Cooper. 

Improvising Antiphony exhibits photographs, documents, and audio from the Lindsay Cooper Archive, housed at the University of the Arts London Archives and Special Collections Centre. 

This display is presented to coincide with the conference, Women in Revolt! Radical Acts, Contemporary Resonances at Tate Britain. 

MA Curating and Collections are: 

Afra Almazrouei, Nis Azmee Murat, Yining Bai, Stephanie Colclough, Mengze Geng, Riccardo Greco, Maria Herrero Tejada, Wenjing Huang, Yaqi Liang, Yijia Liu, Heyue Lu, Ya-hsin Luo, Wenyan Ma, Aayushi Rajput, Qinxue Shen, Mahalia Sobers, Xinhe Tang, Ziyu Tang, Lily Tanprasert, Charmaine Wah, Jiaxin Wang, Xiaoyu Wang, Shuyi Wang, Lin Wanjing, Ziyan Xu, Xingcheng Xu, Jiabin Xu, Xueqing Xu, Wenbin Ye, Kun (Lydia) Yu, Lilian Zancajo-Lugo, Zihan Zhou 

Thanks to: Irene Revell, Lina Džuverović, Georgina Orgill, Zoe Buckberry, UAL Archives and Special Collections Centre, Linsey Young, Lucy Reynolds, Claire M. Holdsworth 

________

Lindsay Cooper (1951–2013) was an innovative English composer and multi-instrumentalist known for her ground-breaking contributions to avant-garde music. Self-taught on bassoon and oboe, she co-founded Henry Cow in the late 1960s, shaping the band’s distinctive fusion of rock, jazz, and classical elements. Cooper’s versatile skills extended to collaborations with the Feminist Improvising Group and the Art Bears. As a composer, Cooper made significant strides in film, television, and theatre, demonstrating a unique ability to blend classical and experimental tones. In 1983, Cooper co-wrote the script for The Gold Diggers, alongside Sally Potter and the artist Rose English. It was Potter’s first feature-length film, made with an all woman crew, featuring stunning photography by Babette Mangolte and a score by Lindsay Cooper. Her compositions, marked by complexity and originality, earned her recognition and her legacy continues to inspire those exploring the boundaries of genre and expression in music and film.

PARALLEL EVENTS

DISCUSSION

Friday 22 March | 2.30pm – 4pm | Taylor Digital Studio 

(the studio is opposite the Women in Revolt! exhibition entrance) 

Counter Print: A Discussion about the Alternative Feminist Art Press 

Chaired by Victoria Horne, with contributions from Catherine Spencer (University of St Andrews), Sonny Ruggiero (University of Edinburgh), Lily Evans-Hill (Courtauld) and Bec Wonders (Oxford). 

The women’s art movement in 1970s and 1980s Britain was catalysed by its alternative periodical press – traces of which can be seen in the extensive vitrine materials of Women in Revolt!. Grassroots magazines, newsletters, journals and pamphlets were designed, duplicated, and handed out at demos, sold at conferences, or passed around consciousness-raising circles. Knowledge generated through activist print networks fuelled a radical break in art production and art history, by communicating new perspectives, materials and practices across regionally dispersed networks of exchange. It is impossible to fully grasp feminism’s seismic break without also understanding the media landscape and communication networks through which it was managed and effected. Yet these paper documents are often overlooked in art’s histories. 

We invite participants to join us for an informal discussion and to take a closer look at magazines such as Feminist Arts News, Spare Rib, WASL Newsletter, and infrastructures including Format Photographers Agency. Approaching the women’s art movement through its independent press enables us to appreciate how feminist ideas about art and its histories were not simply communicated through magazine networks, but were embedded, negotiated, and clarified in the very materials and material processes of periodical production. 

Lily Evans-Hill is a PhD Researcher and Associate Lecturer in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her research tracks artist’s group-work informed by feminism in the UK during the 1970s and 1980s, and focuses on the history of Women Artist’s Slide Library as both a case study and resource for this work. Her research is funded by AHRC.

Victoria Horne is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at Northumbria University in Newcastle. Her essays about feminist periodical histories have been published in journals including Art History, Women: A Cultural Review, and the Journal of Art Historiography – and she is editor of the forthcoming essay collection, Counter Print: The Alternative Art Press in Britain after 1970. 

Sonny Ruggiero is a final-year History of Art PhD researcher at the University of Edinburgh. Her thesis examines 20century feminist periodicals, specifically focussing on the visual culture of Spare Rib magazine. Sonny is also the Chair of the Association for Art History’s Doctoral and Early Career Research Committee. 

Catherine Spencer is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art History, University of St Andrews. In 2021, she co-curated Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism with Caroline Gausden, Kirsten Lloyd, and Nat Raha at Glasgow Women’s Library. She is the author of Beyond the Happening: Performance Art and the Politics of Communication(Manchester University Press, 2020) and co-editor of London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent and Ephemeral Networks, 1960–80 (Penn State University Press, 2018). Her essays have appeared inn Art History, Art Journal, ARTMargins, Tate Papers, Parallax and Oxford Art Journal.

Bec Wonders is a historian focusing on feminist print culture, information activism and female friendship. She most recently held a postdoctoral post at the University of Oxford investigating women’s networks and feminist solidarity. Bec is also an independent archivist and illustrator. www.becwonders.com.

READING GROUP 

Saturday 23 March | 11.30am – 1pm | Taylor Digital Studio

(the studio is opposite the Women in Revolt! exhibition entrance) 

Women of Colour Index Reading Group 

Led by Samia Mailk and Sophie Carapetian. 

WOCI (Women of Colour Index) Reading Group is currently organised and facilitated by founder and director Samia Malik. WOCI is a collection of slides and papers collated by artist Rita Keegan Indexing Women of Colour artists during 1980s and 1990s. Reading Group sessions aim to improve the visibility of women of colour artists whilst using material in the archive to generate discussions, thoughts around practices of: anti racism, anti colonisation and political justice. All people of all backgrounds, genders, sexualities, religions and race are welcome. 

In October 2016, the WOCI Reading Group was co-founded by Samia Malik. In 2015 Samia started working with WOCI at the Women’s Art Library (WAL) at Goldsmiths University, which raised urgent, paramount questions about institutional censorship of the Index and women of colour artists, between 2015–2016 these issues have been explored and investigated by Samia as an artist and curator. 

Workshop text 

“Roadworks is a six-minute colour video of an hour-long performance under-taken by Mona Hatoum for Brixton Art Gallery, London in 1985, during which she walked around barefoot with Doc Martin boots tied to her ankles. The work responded to the socio-political context of Brixton, which at the time was plagued by police violence towards people of colour, which had fuelled the uprisings of 1981 and 1985.” – Women in Revolt!, Linsey Young (2023) 

Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut, Lebanon, to a Palestinian family in 1952. During a short visit to London in 1975, civil war broke out in Lebanon preventing her from returning home. Stranded in London, she decided to study art, first at the Byam Shaw School Art and then the Slade School of Fine Art until 1981. Hatoum’s experience of being stranded in the UK significantly shaped her practice, which deals with issues of living in exile, displacement, containment, and the notion of home. She works across installation, sculpture, video, photography, performance and works on paper.

Biographies 

Sophie Carapetian is an artist, writer, designer and organiser. She is pursuing a PhD at Central Saint Martins entitled ‘Art in the Age of Crisis: Labour Turn in the Culture Industries’, drawing on her research as a participant in the anti-austerity movements. She is a founding member of Boycott Divest Zabludowicz and Arts Against Cuts, with whom she co-produced the anthology Bad Feelings, which was awarded Bookworks’ ‘Common Objectives’ prize in 2012. Her writing has been published in Mute magazine and Ludd Gang and her most recent exhibition ‘Refuse to Collaborate’ was at the Stadt Gallery in Bern in 2022. She regularly designs book covers for small poetry presses as well as making political leaflets and pamphlets for a wide range of campaigns. She lives and works in London. 

Samia Malik is an artist and designer. She’s the director and founder of WOCIReading Group, and she is writing a book about WOCI Reading Group contracted by Book Works. She recently completed an MA in Academic Practice. She works at University of the Arts as an associate lecturer on the Inclusive Practice Unit and workshops designed by her titled ‘Art, Fashion, Politics and Anti-Colonialism’. She has also worked with Shades of Noir and has curated two exhibitions about Palestine. She designs for her streetwear label: Samia Malik ihtgw, which is sold worldwide. The label has collaborated with several musicians and artists. In her earlier years, she studied MA Womenswear at Central Sant Martins and an MFA Fine Arts at Goldsmiths.

READING GROUP

Saturday 23 March | 3pm-4.30pm | Taylor Digital Studio

(the studio is opposite the Women in Revolt! exhibition entrance) 

What Do We Mean When We Talk About Care? 

Feminist Duration Reading Group, led by Beth Bramich, Katrin Lock and Helena Reckitt, with guest artist Leah Clements 

In the light of current debates on the need for art institutions to be more ‘accessible’ and ‘inclusive,’ The Feminist Duration Reading Group leads an out-loud reading session on intersectional feminist explorations of care and access, collectivity and healing. 

Readings open up questions about the different associations and political urgencies of terms including ‘care,’ ‘hospitality,’ ‘access’ and ‘access intimacy.’ Highlighting how art institutions have both co-opted and wilfully misconstrued practices of care, the session points to how we might care for one another better, while also pushing cultural institutions to take better care of us. 

Readings 

Texts include selections from Johanna Hedva’s ‘Sick Woman Theory’ (2016) and ‘Why It’s Taking so Long’ (2022); Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s ‘Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice’ (2018); Mia Mingus ‘Access Intimacy: The Missing Link’ (2011), and Tabita Rezaire ‘Decolonial Healing*: In Defense of Spiritual Technologies’ (2019). 

There is no need to read in advance as we will read together, one person, one paragraph at a time. Readings will be circulated on the day. 

Biographies 

Photographer Katrin Lock, and writers and curators Beth Bramich and Helena Reckitt, are part of the Feminist Duration Reading Group, formed in 2015 to explore under-represented feminisms. The group has organised out loud readings, writing and listening workshops, film screenings, performances, walks, and meals, and a podcast on friendship and feminist organising. The fdrg is currently in residence at Goldsmiths CCA and partners with Cell Project Space, London, on the CEED (Central and East European Diasporas) Feminisms programme, funded by the British Art Network. 

www.feministduration.com

Leah Clements is an artist from and based in East London whose practice spans film, photography, performance, writing, installation, and other media. Her work is concerned with the relationship between psychological, emotional, and physical states often through personal accounts of unusual or hard-to-articulate experiences. Her practice also focuses on sickness/cripness/disability in art, in critical and practical ways. Upcoming projects include a solo show at Peer (2025) and an artwork commissioned by Bethlem for a new hospital (2024). Clements’ is this year’s recipient of the Mosaic Art Award hosted by Hauser & Wirth. Recent projects include her solo shows ‘INSOMNIA’ at South Kiosk (2022-23) and ‘The Siren of the Deep’ at Eastside Projects (2021), and artist-in-residence at Serpentine Galleries (2020-21).

ORGANISING COMMITTEE

Conference co-ordinator | Dr Lucy Reynolds (CREAM, University of Westminster) 

Research, programming and co-ordination | Dr Claire M. Holdsworth (Central Saint Martins, UAL) 

Research and production | Lauren Houlton (Techne / CREAM, University of Westminster) 

ADVISORY PANEL

Professor Rachel Garfield (Royal College of Art), Dr Catherine Grant (Courtauld Institute), Dr Onyeka Igwe (LondonCollege of Communication, UAL), ), Dr Irene Revell (Royal College of Art), Professor Rosie Thomas (CREAM) and Linsey Young (Curator, Contemporary British Art, Tate).  

Printed conference publication designed by Rachael House (www.rachaelhouse.com) and supported by the Women’s Artists Library, Goldsmiths, University of London. 

Thanks to Lucy Rogers (CREAM), Megan Carnrite (CREAM) and Althea Greenan (WAL). 

Tate team | Linsey Young and Lydia Riley.

____

FUNDING

Conference funded by the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art with additional support from Tate Curatorial, Chelsea Space (UAL) and London College of Communication Screen School (UAL). 

The conference is part of the Through a Radical Lens screening series, programmed by Lucy Reynolds to accompany the exhibition Women in revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990 (Tate Britain, 8 November 2023 – 7 April 2024), curated by Linsey Young with Zuzana Flaskova (Assistant Curator), Hannah Marsh (Assistant Curator) and Inga Fraser (Freelance Curator). 

The exhibition and conference title refers to Eve Figes’ Patriarchal Attitudes: The Case for Women in Revolt (1970). 

____

CONFERENCE TEAM

Lucy Reynolds is a researcher, curator and artist, whose research focuses on questions of the moving image, feminism, political space and collective practice. She lectures on creative research at the University of Westminster, she is editor of the anthology Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image, and the co-editor of the Moving Image Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ). As an artist, her ongoing sound work A Feminist Chorus has been heard at the Glasgow International Festival, the Wysing Arts Centre, Grand Union galleries, Birmingham and Swedenborg Hall. Recently, she advised on the film and video exhibits in Women in Revolt: Art and Activism in the UK 1970–1990 at Tate Britain, and curates the ‘Through a Radical Lens’ film season to accompany it. 

Dr Claire M. Holdsworth is a writer, archivist and curator based in London. Specialising in technology-based, moving image and sound art, their writings explore the voice, activism, historiography, performance and archives. Claire lectures at Central Saint Martins (UAL), was a founding member of SODAA music collective, and has archived for curator Jasia Reichardt, artist Isaac Julien and curator Mark Nash, among others. They previously helped organise the event Sound::Gender::Feminism::Activism: Tokyo (2019), have spoken at events such as CTM Festival, published writings in the Moving Image Review and Art Journal and researched and contributed to Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s (2017/2020), co-curating the Towards Other Cinemas screenings with Laura Mulvey and Sue Clayton (Whitechapel Gallery / Close Up, 2017). Currently an independent researcher, Claire is writing a monograph on the intersections between experimental film and music in feminist expanded performance in the 1970s/80s.

Lauren Houlton is a Techne-funded doctoral researcher at the University of Westminster where she is developing a project on feminist collaboration in artist’s filmmaking. She is currently Assistant Editor for the Moving Image Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ) and was the 2022–23 co-convenor of the Paul Mellon Centre’s Doctoral Researchers Network. In 2017 she was awarded the Michael O’Pray Prize for new writing on artist’s moving image.  

____

PRINT-PROGRAMME DESIGN

Rachael House is a UK artist who makes events, objects, performance, drawings and zines, and she thinks they are all the same. Her zines are in museum and university archives and feature in academic and art books, as well as zine fairs, feminist and queer spaces. Other projects range from Genderqueer Deity sculptures, to an ongoing series of piñatas representing the gender binary, patriarchy and the institution of monarchy. Resistance Sustenance Protection, her first book, was published in 2021. Her work is currently at Drawing Room Library Feminist Self Publishing, Queer Britain We Are Queer Britain, Workers Gallery Ordinary/Extraordinary.  

TICKETS / REGISTRATION

£30 (£20 concessions)

Ticket price includes access to both days of the conference and entrance to the Women in Revolt! exhibition at Tate Britain

Access to the opening event at Chelsea Space is not included in the ticket price. For more information, please see the Chelsea Space website.

Buy tickets through the Tate website here.

CONTACT

For information about tickets and accessibility queries please contact the Tate direct:

www.tate.org.uk

E: hello@tate.org.uk

T: +44 (0)20 7887 8888 (daily 10.00–17.00)

For enquiries about the conference please contact: womeninrevolt@westminster.ac.uk