Reimagining women’s art histories
International Women’s Day 2019: feminist time
Wednesday 6 March 2019 6.30 - 7.45pm
The Benjamin West Lecture Theatre, Burlington Gardens, Royal Academy of Arts
£15, £9
Join Phoebe Boswell, Liv Wynter and Griselda Pollock as they interrogate how artists, activists and writers can rethink art history and reinstate women back into the canon. Chaired by critic, academic and broadcaster, Shahidha Bari.
The canon of Western art history has often excluded women and femme-identifying artists. Historically they have been absent from museum collections, art movements and academic curriculums. In light of this there are a variety of activists, artists and theorists who are trying to reinstate underrepresented individuals to the canon in innovative ways.
In this event our panel question how artists can intervene and engage with traditional art historical narratives and discuss the role of art historians, critics and writers today in shaping the art histories of the future? What does an ideal art history look like? How can artists make political and philosophical statements reframing art history?
Speakers include multi-disciplinary artist, Phoebe Bosewell, artist and founding member of WHEREISANAMENDIETA, Liv Wynter, Professor Griselda Pollock (School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies) and critic, academic and broadcaster Shahidha Bari (Chair).
Phoebe Boswell (b. 1982, Nairobi) is an artist who lives and works in London. Boswell studied at the Slade School of Art and Central St Martins, and her work has been widely exhibited. She participated in the Gothenburg International Biennial of Contemporary Art 2015 and was commissioned to make new work for the Biennial of Moving Images 2016 at the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva. Boswell was the first recipient of the Sky Academy Arts Scholarship, was awarded the Special Prize at the Future Generation Art Prize for her interactive installation Mutumia, which consequently showed as part of the 57th Venice Biennal. She is currently the Bridget Riley Drawing Fellow at the British School at Rome, a Ford Foundation Fellow, and is represented in the United States by Sapar Contemporary, New York. She is exhibiting two institutional solo shows, The Space Between Things, curated by Renee Mussai, at Autograph in London till March 30th, and HERE, curated by Liv Stoltz, at the Göteborgs Konsthall until 14 April 2019.
Liv Wynter is an artist, educator, activist and writer from South London. She was Artist in Residence at Tate Britain and Tate Modern in 2017-18 but resigned to protest the institution’s inequalities. She is a founding member of WHEREISANAMENDIETA and currently in residence at Wysing Arts Centre in Cambridgeshire.
Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CENTRECATH) at the University of Leeds. She is committed to creating and extending an international, postcolonial, queer feminist analysis of the visual arts, visual culture and cultural theory, and her work researches issues of trauma and the aesthetic in contemporary art under the concept: ‘the virtual feminist museum’. She is currently working on three books and has published extensively.
Shahidha Bari (Chair) is a critic, academic and broadcaster working in the fields of literature, philosophy and visual culture. She studied at Cambridge, teaches art history and cultural theory at Queen Mary, and is a Fellow of the Forum for Philosophy at the LSE. She was winner of the Observer Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism (2015) and she writes regularly for the Financial Times, Frieze and the Guardian among others. She features frequently on BBC Radio 4, and presents BBC Radio 3's flagship arts and ideas programme, Free Thinking. Her book, Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes will be published by Cape in June 2019.
International Women’s Day 2019: feminist time
What is feminist time? How have scholars, activists and artists interrogated the concept of time to overturn hegemonic narratives of art history? What can challenging and reimagining history do for future artists? How can we collect and curate women’s art?
Through 10 days of discussion, musical performance, talks, workshops and tours, we will explore these essential questions and look to an art world that includes feminist time.