Professor Roshini Kempadoo and Dr Lucy Reynolds, researchers at the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), School of Arts at the University of Westminster, are part of an exhibition at the Tate Britain called Women in Revolt: Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990, which runs until 7 April before starting a UK tour.
This is the first major survey of feminist art in a major national gallery, exhibiting the art of over 100 women artists and collectives working in the UK.
The exhibition presents work by artists who were both shaped by and who vocally contributed to the women’s liberation movement in the UK from the late 1960s. Across six galleries, artists captured activism and protest against systemic inequality against women evoked through disobedient and unruly acts, anger, irony and humour as well as expressions of optimism and hope for a more radical and just society.
The two decades surveyed in the exhibition highlight a time of feminist political activism, characterised by intense feminist intellectual and creative work that railed against masculinity and societal heteronormative structures. Feminist activism raised consciousness of unjust experiences of racism, class, sexuality and disability. The artworks explore a wide range of subjects – pregnancy, motherhood, paid and unpaid domestic work, gendered violence, police brutality, and everyday racism and homophobia. The artworks are contextualised by printed documentation of liberation movements, including posters, pamphlets, manifestos and photographs capturing women’s collective action, gatherings and protests.
Women in Revolt: Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990 runs at Tate Britain until 7 April 2024. The exhibition will then tour to National Galleries Scotland: Modern, Edinburgh (25 May 2024 – 26 January 2025) and to the Whitworth Gallery at the University of Manchester (7 March – 1 June 2025).
Roshini Kempadoo has two photographic artworks on display in Women in Revolt. She has also contributed to the mini-podcast series accompanying the exhibition. Her work My Daughter’s Mind (1984-85) are collages of photographs and texts of women of Asian origin living in the Midlands. The work evokes the challenges and expectations of women’s work and family life. The three generations of women from families Kempadoo met and photographed reflect everyday experiences of what it was like to have migrated, settle and live in the UK during the 1980s. In the series Presence (1990), Kempadoo uses self-portraiture and poetry as ironic takes on fashion magazine pages. Riffing off the African American magazine Essence, the intervention challenges stereotypical conventions deployed in the fashion and beauty industry. Poems by black women surround her images, highlighting the relationship between capitalism and the commodification of Black women’s bodies.
Professor Kempadoo said: “The work by women artists in Women in Revolt provide a timely reminder that our work is not done. Our responsibility and gift to this generation of women is to share the challenges we faced, show how we organised and protested, what we achieved and what failed. Women in Revolt has given us this platform to contribute to a future that allows us to continue to dream, organise and take up our rightful place.”
Dr Reynolds contributed as the curatorial film and video adviser of Women in Revolt, working with the exhibition’s curator Linsey Young. To accompany the gallery exhibition, Dr Reynolds has programmed Through a Radical Lens, a six-part screening and conversation series featuring the film and video work from UK-based feminist artists and collectives. The programme brings together historic film and video works with those by contemporary moving image artists. Through a Radical Lens runs between December 2023 and March 2024 at the Clore Auditorium, Tate Britain, and includes further related screenings at Chelsea Space, the BFI Southbank and Ciné Lumière, Institut Français.
The screening series curated by Dr Reynolds will conclude with a two-day conference, Women in Revolt: Radical Acts, Contemporary Resonances. The conference is organised and supported by Westminster School of Arts’ Centre for Research in Education, Art and Media (CREAM), with additional funding support from the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art. It is hosted by Tate Britain at the Clore Auditorium between 22 and 23 March 2024, with an opening reception at Chelsea Space on 21 March. The conference will explore 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.
Dr Reynolds said: “I am really happy to contribute to this seminal exhibition of feminist art, and to be able to highlight some of the incredible achievements made by feminist film and video artists during the 1970s and 1980s. We hope Women in Revolt, Through a Radical Lens and the associated conference will encourage new generations of feminists to engage with the movement’s creative energy and activism.”
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