A research project by the University of Sydney’s contemporary art school in Rozelle sees several curators and artists form a unique collaboration in a lab-style approach to creating and curating art. Curating Feminism, the title of the experimental exhibition opening at Sydney College of the Arts on 23 October, is also the focus of a three-day program including a conference that will explore how feminist insights and methods inform the curating of contemporary art.
Curating Feminism addresses ideas around the ethics of collaboration between the artist and curator. It adopts a curatorial model of one curator, one artist/artist collective as a way of decentralising the curatorial process.
One of the curators and academics behind the practice-led research project is SCA’s Associate Dean Research Dr Jacqueline Millner. “Curatorial practices that challenge the power relations between artist and curator, including through the figure of the artist-curator, have a long history in feminist art. In Curating Feminism, this approach has been taken up to encourage a more intimate process, to create a more socially, culturally and politically speculative artwork.
“Since the new millennium we have seen social practice emerge as a major form of contemporary art. Consequently, the role of the curator has changed – from the guardian of objects and creator of stories, to the cultivator of relationships between artist, work, museum and gallery, viewer and the broader community.
“Today, to curate is to create knowledge – not to merely represent, publish or exhibit – and to create knowledge is to exercise power, which is where feminism comes into play,” said Dr Millner.
In SCA’s Curating Feminism exhibition, seven curators work alongside an artist or art collective of their choice. “The exhibition included an installation period of several weeks to give curators and artists the rare chance of working together in the SCA galleries, to build a creative space for greater discussion, interaction and activism,” said Dr Millner.
Curators and artists from across the country and abroad, including a group of cross-generational Indigenous women, will feature in the exhibition. They are: Kelly Doley and emerging performance artists Hissy Fit (Sydney); Elvis Richardson and Virginia Fraser (Melbourne); Laura Castagnini (London) and Alice Lang (Los Angeles); Brigid Noone (Adelaide) and two-person art collective SODA_JERK (New York); Jacqueline Millner and Philipa Veitch (Sydney); Jo Holder (Sydney) and the Euraba Papermakers (NSW) and Warmun Art Centre’s Shirley Purdie, Alana Hunt and others (WA).
Two pre-eminent international curators who have pioneered curating as activism will visit Sydney to deliver the keynote speeches at the conference. Speaking at SCA on 23 October is Michael Birchall, a Berlin-based curator, writer and co-publisher of On Curating. Birchall will talk about recent exhibitions and art practices that have responded to protests and demonstrations in North America and Europe, as a resistance to neo-liberalism.
Dr Maura Reilly, founding director of the Elizabeth Sackler Centre for Feminist Art at New York’s Brooklyn Museum, will speak at the Art Gallery of NSW on 24 October. She will talk about curatorial activism – a term she coined to describe exhibition-making practices that give voice to those who have been historically silenced, and hence focus on the work of women, black, non-European and queer artists.
Curating Feminism is the first exhibition of the research group ‘Contemporary Art and Feminism’, set up in October 2013 by University of Sydney’s Dr Catriona Moore and Dr Jacqueline Millner and The Cross Arts Projects’ Jo Holder. The research responds to a massive groundswell in engagement and curiosity about feminism’s role in contemporary art and its relevance to art-making and analysis today.
For more information on the conference program and exhibition, click here.
Event Details
What: Curating Feminism exhibition and conference
When: 23 October – 7 November (conference 23-25 October)
Where: Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney Rozelle Campus, Kirkbride Way, Callan Park, Lilyfield
Hours: 11am-5pm (Monday-Friday), 11am-4pm (Saturday)
