Workshop by Dorothée Smith at Les Rencontres d’Arles Photographie

Posted on May 9, 2013 by admin

Workshop: Dorothée Smith – The invisible side of things

From 8 to 13 July 2013, at the international photography festival Les Rencontres d’Arles Photographie in the south of France. The workshop is bilingual English – French.

Participants will experiment with different technical and aesthetic decisions each day in order to create a personal series.

Dorothée Smith intends to focus on an abstract theme so that everyone has to invent and find solutions in pictorial language.

Illustration: “hear us marhcing up slowly”, Dorothée Smith 2012, courtesy of Galerie les Filles du Calvaire

It involves somehow making an idea or a mental concept perceptible, almost tangible; revealing through photography (or video) what is, in principle, invisible. The themes will be defined according to people’s choice or their questions. There are any number of possibilities: they could include, for example, notions of absence, obsession, identity, soul, ghosts, haunting, and so on.

The work might require staging, or simply involve a sampling of reality, with particular attention to the surroundings and unique atmosphere of the city of Arles, and careful definition of the means used to create the images. It will provide an opportunity to make decisions about technical matters, and the different ways a subject can be treated.

According to their experience, participants can combine video, slide shows, sound effects, and so on, with a conventional photographic approach.

The workshop will also involve plenty of thinking and discussion, particularly about the ideas of authors from disciplines as varied as cinema, philosophy, literature and even dance – all areas that can provide ideas, solutions, and even fresh questions to stimulate people’s projects.

Further details and online registration at the festival site.

Dorothée Smith

Her career has included a post-graduate degree in Philosophy at the Sorbonne, a degree from the French École nationale supérieure de la photographie (ENSP), the TAIK in Helsinki and then at Le Fresnoy, France. Her work can be seen as an observation of constructions, deconstructions, displacements, and transformations of identity. Photography here rubs shoulders with video, hybrid art and the use of new technologies, and has led to collaboration with a research team from the CNRS/IRCICA (French National Centre for Scientific Research) in 2012. Her work has been exhibited at, amongst other places, Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris; Château d’Eau, Toulouse; Atelier de Visu, Marseille; and Casino, Luxembourg – as well as at photography festivals such as Photo Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Pingyao, China and the Daegu Biennale, South Korea, and Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2012. Dorothée Smith is a member of the ‘L’Évadée’ collective and the Hans Lucas Studio de Création. Her work is represented by the gallery Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris.

Femina Potens – Call to Artists

Posted on April 10, 2013 by admin

Press release from Femina Potens, San Francisco

Femina Potens invites you to participate in our upcoming event Dear Mammaries, June 6-9th, as part of San Francisco’s National Queer Arts Festival 2013.

Dear Mammaries is a multimedia group exhibition featuring interactive sculptural and installation based works that address the artists’ unique current or past relationships with their breasts.

Femina Potens is in search of works that use text and visual mediums, which will allow the viewer into this intimate relationship through visual dialogue with our bodies addressing body image, gender identity, breasts as utilitarian objects of desire or nourishment, breasts under attack while combating cancer, and any other relationship with their past, present and future breasts which the artist wishes to address.

This call for work is also extended to writers, activists, and anyone who would like to participate by writing a Dear Mammaries letter to their past, present, and future breasts. Please limit letters to 300 words.

Alongside longer written pieces, Femina Potens will be collecting short letters through social media to include in the exhibition. We invite everyone participating on Twitter to tweet @DearMammaries to tell the stories of their past, present and future breasts in 140 characters, and to follow us as we share those stories.

Femina Potens wants you to start this dialogue online!

In conjunction with the Dear Mammaries exhibition will be a workshop, “Reclaiming Our Bodies”, with artist and community organizer Madison Young, and a facilitated panel discussion with participating artists on body image and the female body as represented in the media and art world.

If you are interested in participating by exhibiting your art or longer written work, please send a bio, a promotional photo and a couple sentences regarding the work that you would be interested in presenting to feminapotensevent@gmail.com.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you,
Coral Aorta, Assistant to Madison Young

Please refer to www.feminapotens.org for location and more information.

Civil Partnership event at the Tate, 2012

Posted on March 22, 2013 by admin

Curating Feminist and Queer Art

The above video presents the highlights of the Civil Partnership Event at Tate in 2012. The symposium was held as part of the Leverhulme funded project Transnational perspectives on women’s art, feminism and curating. “Reflecting on the politics and practices of queer and feminist art curating, this symposium hosted presentations from an international line-up of artists, curators and critics to address a set of key questions: how do feminist and queer projects emerge as art exhibitions?”

Among the speakers were queer/LGBTQ curators Allyson Mitchell, Deirdre Logue, Michael Petry, Matt Smith and Pawel Leszkowicz, who are helping to nurture, feed and cultivate a new tradition of presenting queer subject matter at art museums and national collections.

London: Films by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz

Posted on February 1, 2013 by admin

Charming for the Revolution

Press photo: Charming for the Revolution, courtesy of Tate Modern and the artists.

Three films
by Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz
Friday 1 February 2013, 19.00
The Tanks at Tate Modern, London, UK

The work of Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz reflects on the interplay of sexuality, sexual perversions and representation, continuously returning to unrepresented or illegible moments in history.

The artists will introduce and reflect on each of the works followed by a Q&A after the screening. The film programme features:

CHARMING FOR THE REVOLUTION
Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz
16mm/DVD 11 min. loop , 2009
Performance: Werner Hirsch

“With a wink to Jack Smith, the New York underground performer and filmmaker from the 60’s to the 80’s, as well as to the history of queer and feminist calls such as “wages for housework!”, the film recreates the “housewife” as an ambiguous figure with an open future.”

No Future / No Past
Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz
Installation with two Super 16mm films / HD,
15 min and 15 min, 2011
Performance: Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Fruity Franky, Werner Hirsch, Olivia Anna Livki, G. Rizo

No Future / No Past is a film installation and part of a series of two films that both work on punk archives from the period between 1976 and 2031 investigating the radical negativity, the self-destructiveness and the dystopia of this past moment.
The ” four musicians (Ginger Brooks Takahashi/”Men”; Fruity Franky/”Lesbians on Ecstasy”; G. Rizo; Olivia Anna Livki), and a choreographer (Werner Hirsch)–stage and practice outmoded acts and sentiments of the past that have been deemed useless. The musician-performers provisionally take over the positions of four musicians from the punk movement: Darby Crash, the gay band leader of ”The Germs”, Poly Styrene the singer of the very influential band ”X-Ray-Spex”, Alice Bag, lead singer of the LA Band ”The Bags”, and Joey Ramone, singer of the band ”The Ramones”.”

Normal Work
Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz
Installation with film and
13 photographs, 2007
Performance: Werner Hirsch

“The film „normal work“ asks whether the cros- sings of social hierarchies of class, gender, and „race“ that Hannah Cullwick staged and that she obviously desired have today become generalized into a paradoxical requirement in the field of labor.”
In the film we watch the performer Werner Hirsch / Hannah Cullwick attempt to imitate poses of the 19th century photos of Hannah Cullwick as a maid, a slave, a bourgeois man and a woman.
Werner Hirsch / Hannah Cullwick orients him/ herself to his/her memory, to a mirror, or to a „model“ that is not in the image, or to instructions that are called out to him/her, also from outside the space of the frame.

About the Artists

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz have collaborated since 1998 and their work has been extensively exhibited internationally. Recent solo shows include Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers (Paris Triennale), 2012; Swiss off-site Pavilion, as part of Chewing the Scenery, Venice Biennale, 2011; Les Complices, Zurich, 2010; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, 2010.

Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz say about their work: “Our works often revisit materials from the past, usually photographs or films, referring to and excavating unrepresented or unlegible moments of queerness in history. These works show embodiments which are not only able to cross different times, but also to draw relations between these different times, thus revealing possibilities for a queer futurity.”

Charming for the Revolution: A Congress for Gender Talents and Wildness

The above event is a part of Charming for the Revolution: A Congress for Gender Talents and Wildness February 1 – 3, 2013. To mark to start of LGBT month next February, Tate presents a series of events in The Tanks at Tate Modern which considers pressing questions around contemporary sexual and gender politics. This three-day event series includes films, performances and a symposium featuring work by Pauline Boundry & Renate Lorenz, Carlos Motta, and Wu Tsang. The series seeks to highlight a range of recent projects by this vibrant group of artists, activists and thinkers who have shaped the discussion of sexual and gender representation into one of the most exciting and urgent cultural debates.

Lesbian Lives Conference 2013

Posted on January 28, 2013 by admin

Lesbian Lives Conference 2013
15th Feb 2013 – 16th Feb 2013
Sallis Benney Theatre, Brighton, UK

20th Annual Lesbian Lives Conference, ‘The Modern Lesbian’ Held on 15-16 February 2013 and hosted by University of Brighton LGBT and Queer Life Research Hub in conjunction with Women’s Studies Centre, University College Dublin.

The Lesbian Lives Conference is the world’s only annual academic conference in Lesbian Studies – it is a large international event that draws speakers and participants from all continents and hosts the best-known as well as emerging scholars in the field. The theme for the 20th Annual Lesbian Lives Conference is The Modern Lesbian. The registration is open now.

This conference has a very rich programme of women presenting their research. I have had a look at the programme to see if there are any presentations of arts related research.

Friday 15 February 2013 there is one session. The programme reads:

“Art is Long, Life is Short: Modern women artists, collaboration and legacy at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
1. Zoe Clayton (V&A), The Boston Marriage of Judith Ackland and Mary Stella Edwards – watercolourists and diorama makers (1919-1971)
2. Dawn Hoskin (V&A), The Suffrage Atelier: Working Together & Contesting ‘Womanliness’
3. Mara Gold (V&A), Collaborative ‘Arrangements’: the work of Frances Hodgkins and Dorothy Richmond.”

And in the programme Saturday 16 February 2013 I have spotted an artist presentation by Deborah Wheeler, USA.

This year the organizers are not offering the home stay option for accommodation, but invite you to join their facebook page titled Lesbian Lives Conference UDC.

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Fine Art Made by Lesbian and Queer Women Artists Worldwide

Category Archives: workshops, seminars & conferences