Curating Materiality: Feminism and Contemporary Art History
Workshop, 13th June 2015
Evolution House, Edinburgh College of Art10.45-16.30
Feminism’s impact on the visual arts and art history has been widely felt since the late 1960s. Feminist art practices have consistently employed performative, participatory, digital and biopolitical methodologies, all of which are widely theorised in art histories as being dematerialised, immaterial and impermanent. Curating Materiality seeks to nuance and complicate such assumptions, bringing researchers, curators and practitioners together in discussion and exchange around the following questions:
- What are the material aspects of feminist contemporary art practices, from their physical ‘traces’ to their impact within communities?
- What is the potential of curating as a research methodology for developing new insights into the material dimensions of feminist art practices and histories?
- How can we address the neglected links between radical artistic and curatorship in contemporary art since the 1960s?
- What are the challenges posed to archiving and curating by feminist practices in and of themselves?
- How do curatorial practices engage with both different forms of materiality, and immateriality (for example in relation to performance and new media)? What is the relationship between curatorial practice and archiving?
- What role does ‘care’ play in curating?
The workshop will consist of ‘pecha-kucha’ style presentations from delegates; talks by Alexander Hetherington (Modern Edinburgh Film School); Adele Patrick (Glasgow Women’s Library); and Elaine Shemilt and Laura Leuzzi (Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design); and a roundtable led by Sarah Smith (Glasgow College of Art).
If you are interested in attending the Curating Materiality workshop as a delegate, please contact Catherine on Catherine.spencer@st-andrews.ac.uk
Curating Materiality has been organised collaboratively between Sarah Cook (Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art); Kirsten Lloyd (University of Edinburgh); and Catherine Spencer (University of St Andrews); and with kind assistance from Victoria Horne (University of Edinburgh) and Amy Tobin (University of York). (This event has been generously supported by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities.)
Writing Feminist Art Histories 