23 September – 1 November 2024
Curated by Marita Fraser and James Hutchinson
Annex Gallery, Glasgow School of Art
Artisits
Sara Barker / Yiyang Chen / Anne-Marie Copestake / Kate Davis / Caroline Douglas Rebecca Fortnum / Marita Fraser / Marianne Greated / Shauna McMullan / Nat Raha/ Katarina Ranković / Margaret Salmon / Sharon Young
Feminist Methods brings together work from current and past GSA School of Fine Art staff and research students who have an ongoing engagement with feminist methods in practice, as an event under the umbrella of the SoFA, Feminist Research Group
Performance, reenactment, copying, embodiment, archive-analysis and performative drawing are some of the many ways feminist concerns are brought to bear in the social, political, environmental and cultural spheres. Feminist methods can be employed within processes of making, writing and thinking, and they may be immediately evident at the surface level of the works presented – whether aesthetically or through the message being transmitted – or more subtly, through a work’s underlying structures or its maker’s relationship to daily life.
The exhibition has emerged from an evolving feminist research group within the School of Fine Art, a group which seeks to situate and examine the diverse range of feminisms present within the work of its members and the wider research community of which it is a part. The works present within Annex Gallery were made as early as 2009 and as recently as this year; and in keeping with the group’s state of emergence, some of the material displayed is not yet finished: it is presented amongst more resolved works as a means to explore how becoming public in a state of vulnerability might affect its direction of travel and finished form (if, indeed, it ever becomes ‘finished’).
In her 2021 introduction to The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing, Hannah Dawson wrote: ‘the lens of feminism must be wide, and constantly refocused to see those at the margin. Feminist methods are not a fixed set of tools, but rather continuously evolving approaches to productive practices that address marginal concerns outside of linear history, that address or emerge from archival gaps, that develop positions of subjecthood outside patriarchal structures. This exhibition is but a small cluster of methodologies that embody such aims.
https://radar.gsa.ac.uk/9895