This book examines contemporary feminist visual activism(s) through the lens of embodiment(s). The contributors explore how the arts articulate and engage with the current sense of crisis and political concerns (e.g. equality, decolonisation, social justice, democracy, precarity, vulnerability), negotiated with and through the body.
Drawing upon the legacy of feminist art historical critique, the book scrutinises activist strategies, practices and resilience techniques in intersectional and transnational frameworks. It interrogates how the arts enable the creation of civil and political resilience, become engaged with politics as a response to disaster capitalism and attempt to reform and improve society.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, fine arts, women’s studies, gender studies, feminism and cultural studies.
1 Not White, Not Male and Not New York: Race, Feminism and Artists in Pittsburgh
Hilary Robinson
2 Activist Intension: Mona Hatoum and Morehshin Allahyari’s Disruptive Bodies
Astrid N. Korporaal
3 Activating Agential Collective: Anna Baumgart’s Table Talks—Her-Stories, Solidarity and Feminist Corporeal-Materialism
Basia Sliwinska
4 The Absent Image: Resisting the Erosion of Public Trust in Syrian Activists’ Evidential Visuality
Mario Hamad
5 Bodies, Sovereignties, Futurities: On Adelita Husni-Bey’s Practice
Anastasia Murney
6 Domestic Fronts: Arrangements for Feminist Living, or Survival Is Not a Metaphor
Alexandra Kokoli
7 A Care-Full Re-Membering of Australian Settler Colonial Homemaking Traditions
Sera Waters
8 Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance: Activating Feral Materiality
Paula Chambers
9 When Theodorah Met Dolly: Gender and Visual Activism in Works by Senzeni Marasela
Brenda Schmahmann
10 Be-Longing: Filipina Women Artists in Israel Negotiating Self, Body and Place
Tal Dekel
11 Women to the Front: Women’s Participation and Visual Activism in Hong Kong’s Protest Movement 2019
Evelyn Kwok
12 !Madres!: Reconfiguring ‘Abducted Motherhood’ in Mónica Mayer’s Personal and Collective Artwork
Karen Cordero Reiman
13 Corpo-Affective Politics of Anxious Breathing: On the Agential Force of Bodies and Affects in Vulnerable Protest
Magdalena Górska
14 The Revolutionist: Gendered Violence, Black Radical Feminism and the Decolonial Creative Revolution
Nomusa Makhubu
15 Fragmented Traces. . . The Tactile Feminist Un-Monuments of Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Caroline Wallace
Biography
Basia Sliwinska is Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Historical Studies at the University of the Arts London. She is a member of the Comittee on Women in the Arts of the College of Art Association and the Steering Group for the PARADOX Fine Art European Forum.
"This volume is a powerful articulation of what feminist visual activism can and does achieve as a global force. It has spaces, gaps, and occlusions. This is not a problem or a weakness; rather this is the truthfulness and care that Sliwinska and her co-producers assert for this field of research and understanding."
--Woman's Art Journal
