The culmination of the eighteen-month research network project, Transnational perspectives on women’s art, feminism and curating, was a symposium at Tate Modern, London with concurrent workshop and exhibition. A parallel exhibition, programme of events and celebration was held at the University of Brighton’s Grand Parade venue and a publication was produced.

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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? Can queers and feminists get along with the institutional art world? And can they get along with each other?

The conference ticket allowed free entry to the Axe Grinding Workshop with FAG (Feminist Art Gallery) and David Hoyle’s Queer Tate Tour, on the evening of the 18th May. In connection with the conference, FAG directors Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell host a queer show-and-tell ‘to fuel the power of the feminist kill joy, and shine up the old battle-axe’. Located in Toronto, FAG works with ‘a diverse community of individuals and artists, and their collective and communal powers, to host, fund, advocate, support, exhibit, claim, house and feed.’

Audio recordings of the conference are available from the Tate Modern website.

Civil partnerships? Queer and feminist curating. 19 May 2012

May 18 – 19, 2012

Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium, Saturday 19 May 2012, 10.30 – 17.30

Programme

10.30 Introduction and keynote address, Maura Reilly (Professor and Chair of Art Theory, Griffith University, Australia): Toward a Curatorial Activism

11.20 Q&A with Maura Reilly and Lara Perry (Brighton)

Panel One: Queer Visual Strategies

11.40 FAG: Feminist Art Gallery, Toronto, Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue CAN’T/WON’T

12.00 Lisa Metherell, artist, Birmingham, Queer Encounters with Art: (Dis)Orientations Beyond Representations of Sexual Bodies

12.20 Q&A with FAG and Lisa Metherell chaired by Helena Reckitt (Goldsmiths)

Panel Two: Queer Collections

14.00 Suzana Milevska (Skopje) Staging the Transgression

14.20 Matt Smith (Brighton) Embedding Queer into Collections

14.40 Q&A chaired by Patrik Steorn (Stockholm)

Panel Three: Queer Contexts

15.45 Michael Petry, (London) Corporate Queers: suits, ties and pin-striped shirts. Curating in a business environment;

16.05 Pawel Leskowicz, (Lublin) Queering the National Museum of Poland

16.25 Elke Krasny (Vienna) Queering Memory: Morzinplatz, Vienna

16.45 Q&A chaired by Emily Pringle (Tate Modern)

17.15 Closing Remarks

 

Logo for Lottery funded by Arts Council England.

 

Realist painting of two women with similar features, dark hair and identical white blouses and blue dresses lying side by side on grass. Natalie Papamichael, 'Two Annas'

Natalie Papamichael, ‘Two Annas’

Civil Partnerships – queer & feminist art & activism

Exhibition –  9 – 20 May 2012

Grand Parade, corridor, foyer and café.
Private View of Exhibition May 11, 4pm

Discussion – 11 May 2012

Discussion on same-sex marriage with Caroline Lucas
University of Brighton, Grand Parade Boardroom 2:30pm

Forum – 17 May 2012

A forum on queer & feminist art & activism
University of Brighton, Grand Parade G4, 11:00-5

Civil Partnerships was a programme of events and art at the Grand Parade campus of the University of Brighton in conjunction with the symposium at Tate Modern. This programme came together through an unexpected but wonderful collaboration which is international and transgenerational in scope, with participants brought together by a commitment to understanding and ending gender and sexual inequality through art.

This exhibition of artworks used diverse strategies to address different aspects of our project, from tender consideration of the unique subject to political campaigning posters from around Europe.

To expand on the issues addressed through this work we organized two events, a debate on gay marriage in Europe on May 11 and a public forum on feminist and queer curating on May 17th, all of which were held at the University of Brighton campus with the support of the Faculty of Arts and the Arts Council.

The symposium at Tate Modern, was organized as the final event in the 18-month research network project funded by the Leverhulme Foundation, and including a international programme of prominent artists and curators, with some special performances, was the denouement of our programme. The hope was that everyone would find something in our programme to delight, to inspire, and to energize.

A publication was produced as part of Civil Partnerships, download a PDF version here.