Elliptical Affinities: Irish Women Artists and the Politics of the Body 1984-present
- Submitting institution
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Manchester Metropolitan University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 253000
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, Ireland
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of first exhibition
- November
- Year of first exhibition
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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B - Art & Performance
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This research brings together for the first time two moments when feminist art has powerfully articulated pressing concerns in Irish politics: the conjoining of church and state in the 1983 Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution enshrining rights of the unborn child, and the successful referendum to repeal this amendment in 2018. The exhibition format builds on the visibility of artists in the Repeal movement, demonstrating intergenerational connections with earlier political conditions for explicitly feminist Irish art not previously investigated. Drawing on models of non-linear history Barber proposes an ‘elliptical traverse’ across both decades, derived from the ground-breaking feminist exhibition ‘Inside the Visible’ (1996) and developing Barber’s previous research on genealogies and temporalities of Irish women’s art (2018), where the term ‘femmage’ is appropriated to signify new intergenerational relationships of affinity and influence between women unacknowledged in canonical art histories. Informed by feminist temporalities (Browne 2014), epistemologies (Haraway 2017) and curatorial practice (de Zegher 1996, Dimitrakaki and Perry 2013), ‘femmage’ is here expanded into a curatorial engagement with the spatial, architectural and historic features of the Highlanes Gallery, visualising feminist histories of affirmation and resistance. Work from 1984 to 2019 by thirteen artists was selected through studio visits and archival research. The gallery installation juxtaposing 1980s and contemporary work resulted in the emergence of significant shifts in female embodiment not previously apparent in Irish art, notably from binary gender definitions and subversion of religious imagery in the Eighties to a new fluidity of queer and posthuman identities in contemporary practice. This provided fresh insights into the relationship between art and body politics, in addition to contributing to new feminist discourses that radically challenge canonical formations of art history. These thematic insights are also disseminated through three further outcomes, the exhibition catalogue, symposium, and exhibition tour.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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