UNFINISHED BUSINESS: Perspectives on Art and Feminism UNFINISHED BUSINESS Perspectives on Art and Feminism

UNFINISHED BUSINESS: Perspectives on art and feminism UNFINISHED BUSINESS Perspectives on art and feminism

15 December 2017 – 25 March 2018

Curators: Paola Balla Max Delany Julie Ewington Annika Kristensen Vikki McInnes Elvis Richardson ARTISTS Alex Martinis Roe Megan McMurchy Another Planet Posters Inc. Spence Messih Tracey Moffatt Atong Atem Ann Newmarch Margot Nash Cigdem Aydemir Claudia Nicholson Nat and Ali Ali Gumillya Baker Ruth O’Leary Margot Oliver Archie Barry Frances (Budden) Phoenix Monica Pellizzari Vivienne Binns Elizabeth Pulie Patricia Piccinini Hannah Brontë Clare Rae Jacinta Schreuder Janet Burchill Hannah Raisin Soda Jerk and Jennifer McCamley Tai Snaith Jeni Thornley Madison Bycroft Giselle Stanborough Sarah Watt Sadie Chandler Desiree Tahiri Jackie Wolf aka Jackie Farkas Kate Daw Sophie Takách Linda Dement Salote Tawale PERFORMANCE PROGRAM Narelle Desmond Nat Thomas Frances Barrett Kelly Doley The Cross Art Projects Barbara Campbell Mikala Dwyer Lyndal Walker Hannah Donnelly Mary Featherston Shevaun Wright Embittered Swish and Emily Floyd Lyndal Jones Fiona Foley FILM PROGRAM Técha Noble FRAN FEST Poster Project Hayley Arjona Linda Sproul Virginia Fraser Gillian Armstrong and Elvis Richardson Art Theory Productions Sarah Goffman Barbara Campbell Elizabeth Gower Barbara Cleveland Natalie Harkin Essie Coffey Sandra Hill Megan Cope Hissy Fit Emma-Kate Croghan Jillposters Destiny Deacon Kate Just and Virginia Fraser Maria Kozic Sue Dodd LEVEL Helen Grace Eugenia Lim Deborah Kelly Lip Collective The Kingpins Linda Marrinon Samantha Lang CONTENTS 6 PARTNER’S PREFACE 68 CYBERFEMINIST 132 FILM PROGRAM Carol Schwartz AM BEDSHEET Linda Dement 136 PERFORMANCE 8 FOREWORD PROGRAM Linda Mickleborough 78 HISTORY IS A SOFT CLAY 138 LIST OF WORKS 12 UNFINISHED BUSINESS MEDIUM: EUGENIA Max Delany LIM AND SALOTE 144 CONTRIBUTORS TAWALE 22 UNFINISHED Laura Castagnini 145 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS FEMINISM, UNCEASING ACTIVISM: 90 WOMEN WITH US AUSTRALIAN ART Ellen van Neerven OVER FIVE DECADES Julie Ewington 98 GENDER EQUITY AND THE CLASSROOM: 30 THANK YOU THE FITZROY HIGH Annika Kristensen SCHOOL FEMINIST COLLECTIVE 38 I CAN’T BELIEVE I STILL Nat Thomas HAVE TO PROTEST THIS FUCKING SHIT 108 ON ART, THE Vikki McInnes PREDATOR, AND THE GRAVEYARD OF 46 BLAK FEMALE MODERN CELEBRITY FUTURISMS AND YTE GARDENING FEMINISM WAVES Van Badham Paola Balla 120 FEMINISM AND ART: 56 WHEN ART MEETS NOT DONE YET FEMINISM Jude Adams Elvis Richardson PARTNER’S PREFACE

The Trawalla Foundation is a proud partner of ACCA’s exhibition Unfinished Business: Perspectives on art and feminism. Art is a reflection of our culture and values, expressing how we regard the issues of our time. The title ‘Unfinished Business’ aptly highlights our current situation – where Australian women still experience a gender pay gap of over 15%,1 there are only 25% of women on ASX 200 boards,2 and women are 75% of art school graduates but only 34% of artists exhibited in our state museums and galleries.3 This exhibition provides an important and timely opportunity to explore and debate the progress of Australian women through the lens of feminist art.

A Trawalla Foundation priority is to invest in organisations that challenge the gender imbalance and strengthen the representation of women – including in politics, business, media and the arts. We have catalysed programs such as ‘Pathways to Politics’ for Australian women (in partnership with the University of Melbourne), funded innovative gender research by Professor Cordelia Fine, and founded organisations such as the Women’s Leadership Institute. Importantly, we also support and celebrate women artists, writers and producers through initiatives such as the Stella Prize and She-Doc.

We are delighted to be partners in this thought- provoking exhibition, and congratulate Max Delany and the ACCA team for their innovation and impact.

Carol Schwartz AM Chair, Trawalla Foundation

1 https://www.wgea.gov.au/addressing-pay-equity/what-gender- pay-gap 2 http://aicd.companydirectors.com.au/advocacy/board-diversity/ statistics 3 http://countesses.blogspot.com.au/

Linda Marrinon What I must bear 1982 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 172.0 x 203.0 cm Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art 8 University of Western Australia 9 ACCA is proud to present Unfinished We also extend heartfelt thanks to Margaret contribution will add nuance and perspective, FOREWORD Business: Perspectives on art and feminism, Morgan and Wesley Phoa, Lead Donors to the extending the relevance of the exhibition to Linda Mickleborough a major exhibition illuminating a critical exhibition. We appreciative their significant a great diversity of people and enhancing its period in recent contemporary art practice. ongoing support of ACCA’s programs, and their impact over time. Continuing ACCA’s ongoing series of Big enthusiastic response to the feminist contentions Picture exhibitions focussing on contemporary of the exhibition. From a personal perspective, this exhibition, with art’s relationship to wider social, cultural and its trans-generational, multi-voiced, community political contexts, Unfinished Business presents We are honoured to have received the support from connected, feminist approach is deeply resonant. an exciting and timely opportunity to reflect the Victorian Government’s Office of Prevention & As a young woman my first role in the arts on the many achievements of feminism and Women’s Equality, and we thank Natalie Hutchins was at the Community Arts Board (CAB) of the the challenges that remain. The exhibition is MP, Minister for Women, for her commitment and Australia Council. This was at the time of Vivienne accompanied by an ambitious series of artist support of public and professional development Binns’ ground-breaking feminist, community talks, performances, symposia, education programs. ACCA would also like to acknowledge project Mothers’ memories others’ memories programs, film screenings and discussions, the work of Fiona Richardson MP, and note the 1980. I got to know Viv through the Director making space for a great diversity of voices. sadness of her passing during the planning stages of the CAB, Andrea Hull, who had become a of the exhibition. mentor and a friend. It was exciting for me, as a How could an exhibition such as this be anything young self-identified feminist firebrand, to have but collaboratively conceived and made? ACCA Our other significant partners include the this connection to Mothers’ memories others’ is delighted to be working with an extraordinary University of Melbourne, who have contributed to memories, a work that reframed women’s creative number of outstanding artists, partners the depth of the public programs that will unfold practice within a feminist, social and political and collaborators to realise this ambitious across the exhibition; SHEILA: a foundation for context. A couple of years later my close friend undertaking. We would like to extend our sincere women in the visual arts, with whom we are Jen Saunders, then also in her early twenties, thanks and appreciation to the artists, our pleased to present a series of public symposiums, worked with Viv to create the archive for Mothers’ collaborators, partners, donors and staff. and the inaugural SHEILA lecture; and our memories others’ memories, putting slides Exhibition Partners Dulux and Jackson Clements between plates of glass and labelling the images. Unfinished Business has been developed by a Burrows Architects. And we are also pleased to Then, only a few months ago, my daughter (now curatorial team that includes Paola Balla, Julie present the exhibition in dialogue with a parallel in her early twenties) called to ask if I knew of the Ewington, Vikki McInnes and Elvis Richardson, program of residencies and performances, Doing artist Vivienne Binns, as she had been engaged by working in collaboration with ACCA’s Artistic Feminism: Sharing the World, led by Professor Viv to digitise images from the Mothers’ memories Director and CEO Max Delany and Senior Curator Anne Marsh, which culminates in February 2018 archive. To witness another young woman engage Annika Kristensen. The exhibition features the with a major conference and symposium. with the legacy of this work, decades after its critical, inspiring work of over seventy artists, inspirational effect on me, has been deeply film-makers and collaborators, to whom we are Artist Emily Floyd and design legend Mary moving. I anticipate that there will be many especially grateful. Featherston have been commissioned to create works from the extraordinary range of artists and a ‘round table’ that serves both as a central practices in Unfinished Business that will inspire We are also grateful to the writers who have sculptural presence and gathering space for across generations in different ways. contributed insightful essays to this publication, conversation, discussion and debate at the heart and to the curators of the film program, Helen of the exhibition. As well as being a place for Asking why feminism is still relevant, necessary Grace, Femflix (Dr Jacqueline Millner, Jane curated events, the round table will welcome and critical today, Unfinished Business embodies Schneider and Deborah Szapiro), Kym Maxwell artists and community members throughout feminist methodologies and explores trans- and Laura Castagnini. Additionally, we thank the the course of Unfinished Business, generously generational legacies through the work of many artists, academics, historians, feminists, supported by Lou and Will McIntyre. established and emerging artists. We anticipate among a wide range of presenters contributing to that the exhibition and accompanying film, the public programs and performance series. Our appreciation goes to our wonderful ACCA performance, public and education programs will staff, the indefatigable install crew, skilfully be inspiring, polemical, humorous, irreverent and We are especially thankful for the involvement led by Exhibition Manager Samantha Vawdrey, thought-provoking. We hope that you will join the of the Trawalla Foundation, Lead Partner for and terrific interns Eloise Breskvar and Brigid conversation. Unfinished Business. Our warm appreciation to Hansen, for all their work in bringing Unfinished Carol Schwartz AM, Trawalla Chair, for embracing Business to fruition. I would particularly like to the ambitious aims of the exhibition and acknowledge Anabelle Lacroix, curator of the associated programs and then extending our extensive public and performance program and ambition through introductions to her extensive Eliza Devlin and ACCA’s Education team for the networks, including the Women’s Leadership development of the education programs and Institute Australia and University of Melbourne’s resources set to engage students from primary Pathways to Politics Program. Thank you to Sarah to tertiary levels throughout the course of the Buckley, Dr Meredith Martin and Amy Mullins for exhibition. their contributions to these conversations. All of our artists, collaborators, partners and staff bring different and important contributions to Unfinished Business. We are grateful that each

10 11 The Cross Art Projects, Sydney [producer] Future Feminist Archive 2016 Lip Collective Deborah Kelly Lip, no.8, 1984 La Lucha Continua 2016 Australian feminist arts journal archival pigment ink on cotton rag 12 Collection: Lesley Alway 50.0 x 70.0 cm 13 UNFINISHED BUSINESS Feminism’s influence on art and society has previously accorded minor status within the patriarchal bias, seeking equal representation been profound, and enduring. It has dramatically canon of modernist art history. The development of women artists through advocacy and Max Delany reshaped contemporary art practice in Australia of inclusive, collaborative and socially-engaged activism; organising separatist and alternative and internationally, in a complex history of art practices, democratic modes of production spaces for the exhibition and distribution of dynamic relationships with wider social relations and distribution, and new forms of collective women’s cultural practices; intervening in and discourse. It is now fifty years since Vivienne labour, cultural activism and institutional the site of art-historical production – through Binns’ legendary 1967 exhibition Vag Dens at critique, owe much to the ground-breaking feminist collectives and journals, study groups Watters Gallery in Sydney introduced ‘central initiatives of so-called second-generation or and academia, slide registers and archives, core imagery’ into the visual lexicon, critically ‘women’s movement feminisms’ of the 1970s. etc. – and positing the existence of a ‘female affirming the power of women’s sexuality whilst aesthetic’ or ‘sensibility’, along with ideals of also provoking – through repeated images of With roots in social change and activism, and gender difference.4 the vagina dentata – a good measure of seeking different ways of being in the world, castration anxiety amongst the patriarchy. It feminisms in the 1970s took many forms, also Whilst equality of access and representation in a is more than forty years since International coinciding with, and propelling, wider political political and legal sense remained, and remains Women’s Year in 1975 built on the grassroots engagements with indigenous and civil rights today, of singular importance, psychoanalytic activism of a then nascent feminist art movement movements, and anti-war, ecological and and post-structural feminisms sought to in Australia, with its influential collectives – the counter-cultural positions. At stake was the critically analyse the very question Sydney’s Women’s Art Movement formed in reformist notion of attaining equal rights and of representation itself. These approaches 1974, the Women’s Art Register in Melbourne in representation for women in culture and law. focussed on the gendered nature of 1975 and, in the following year, the Women’s Art Marxist and socialist feminisms, for instance, representation, on how women were Movement in Adelaide and Lip: A Journal saw women’s oppression as an effect of social, represented, and how identity and experience of Women in the Visual Arts in Melbourne. In economic and class conditions under capitalism are subject to institutionalised, unconscious 1975 American feminist critic Lucy Lippard’s and patriarchy. But the question of equal bias – how we as individuals are ‘born into visit to Australia was instrumental in contributing rights, and the notion of representation itself, language’, and already written by patriarchy, to and energising these initiatives, which were radically called into question by schools of capitalism, media, family and religion.5 included significant exhibitions and contributions feminism which drew upon the psychoanalytic Analysis of the ways women (and others) have to art history and academia. These included theories of Freud and Lacan, along with French been offered up to the mastery of the male Janine Burke’s Australian Women Artists: post-structuralism, to take account of the ways gaze served to divert attention away from 1840–1940 at the Ewing and George Paton in which identity and sexual difference are representations of ‘women’ and onto the mode Galleries at the University of Melbourne in 1975; socially inducted and psychically constructed.3 of representation itself; how we see things, the first feminist academic programs, taught In these two historically coincident yet how images are constructed. These critiques by Jude Adams in Sydney and Ann Stephen conceptually differentiated positions – socialist of ideology, and of patriarchal ways of seeing in Melbourne, which came in 1976; and major feminisms that called for equality and freedom, and being, also foregrounded the nature of initiatives such as The Women’s Show, organised and psychoanalytic feminisms that stressed femininity as masquerade, of sexuality as pose, by Julie Ewington and others in the WAM in the fundamental psycho-social construction of imposition and imposture, and of identity as Adelaide in 1977, which saw feminist art practices gender identity and sexual difference – we see performative,6 ideas which were promulgated capture the imagination on a national scale.1 divergent feminisms sit side by side, between by directorial modes of photography and representational politics and the politics of performance art which situated the gendered Feminism was never singular, but plural representation, on diverse fronts that have body at the centre of the action. and polyphonic. As Cornelia Butler declares, continued to shape broad developments in both ‘feminism’s impact on art of the 1970s art and popular culture. As a result of the critiques of representation constitutes the most influential international that feminist practice and discourse has ‘movement’ of any during the postwar period In the former case, feminism called for engendered over more than four decades, – in spite or perhaps because of the fact that economic independence, equal pay and access feminism itself has been subject to it seldom cohered, formally or critically, into to employment; for a redistribution of the considerable critique and debate, opening a movement...’2 Feminism’s influence has division of labour between the sexes; and for up to wider considerations of class, race, dramatically expanded ideas of what art can the affirmation of sexual freedom, orientation ethnicity and non-binary gender positions. be. It spurred radical and hybridised practices and reproductive rights. These found parallels at Aboriginal academic and activist Aileen encompassing performance, installation, film, art institutional levels – in the identified absence Moreton-Robinson’s compelling analysis of photography and video. It validated women’s or under-representation of women artists in the ‘whiteness’ of Australian feminism and its experience, domestic subjects, and what had exhibitions, museum collections, art history and effect on Indigenous women revealed blind traditionally been considered ‘women’s work’ academia. Over successive decades feminist spots in earlier feminisms, pointing to the – craft, decorative arts and textile practices, artists and critics have challenged the art world’s privilege of white middle-class feminism and

14 15 its allegiance to the forces of colonisation.7 Unfinished Business constitutes one nexus Gender-queer and trans identities have now of the shifting energies and articulations radically debunked binary understandings of of contemporary feminism. Adopting identity as fixed and biologically determined a collaborative, polyphonic form that – challenging essentialist feminist positions, encourages diverse voices, practices and and normative conceptions of sex and gender, debates, Unfinished Business reflects upon that failed to account for variation, difference these histories and their legacies in the and the possibilities of change – instead present, through new commissions and promoting understandings of gender as recent work, presented alongside selected performative, psycho-socially informed or historical projects, and programs of film and acquired rather than biologically determined.8 performance. Importantly, the exhibition is And the dystopian dreams of cyberfeminism, not intended as an historiographic survey of which embraced the zeros in the binary code feminist art practices in Australia – this too as productive holes and tunnels of escape still remains to be done.12 from their upright counterparts, the number ones, have since ‘given the finger to binaries’ Rather, Unfinished Business focuses upon altogether.9 As the writer Eleanor Penny inter-generational dialogues, the passing of recently stated at the Post-Cyber Feminist the torch back and forth between generations, International 2017: ‘The future is not what it with a primary, inevitably partial, focus on the used to be’.10 contemporary context, and the ‘unfinished business’ of feminism today. Conceived to • animate critical, although under-represented, practices and debates within contemporary Today, in the public sphere, notwithstanding Australian art and society, Unfinished Business the many gains and breakthroughs resulting explores the dynamic formal invention and social from feminism’s social impact and cultural engagement of feminist artists; strategies and influence, much remains to be done. In recent analyses of gender identity and representation; years contemporary feminism has enjoyed the productive complexity of intersectional renewed and timely public interest in Australia politics and diverse ways of being; and practices and internationally – evidenced by Julia which embrace performative codes, text and Gillard’s now famous misogyny speech of media technologies, humour and critique. 2012, and the Women’s Marches in January 2017, which saw an estimated five million A number of intersecting threads weave demonstrators take to the streets worldwide dynamically through Unfinished Business, in to advocate for transformative social change. dialogue and debate. A fundamental strand Closer to home, Elvis Richardson’s project running through decades of Australian feminist The CoUNTess Report has exposed patterns work is a critical engagement, and often of gender inequality and ageism in the visual subversive or incendiary play, with language, arts. Women still remain under-represented image, text, and media – from the wry and in museum collections and exhibition irreverent announcements of FEMMO magazine programs, and in the media and academia, bill-posters to the pulsating, transgressive, which reflects wider structural inequalities corporeal language of Linda Dement’s three- related to women’s employment, income and channel video Feminist methodology machine the division of labour.11 Most alarming are the 2016. Kelly Doley’s Things learnt about feminism shocking levels of domestic violence, sexual #1–95 2014 mobilises witty aphorisms and harassment and abuse, that have been at lessons learned through the collaborative the forefront of urgent public conversations work of consciousness-raising, activism and nationally and internationally. As one of the inter-generational dialogue, to speak to the slogans from the Women’s March proclaimed: inherent contradictions and complexities of the ‘I can’t believe I still have to protest this movement, and Maria Kozic’s billboard Bitch fucking shit’ – a sentiment echoed in a neon 1990, and Sarah Goffman’s I am with you 2017, work by artist Kate Just which simply exclaims: project women’s voices in the public sphere, ‘Furious’. speaking loud and proud, as do posters from Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley Aesthetic Suicide 2013 installation view World Food Books, Melbourne Courtesy the artists and Neon Parc, Melbourne 16 photograph: Joshua Petherick 17 diverse print portfolios since the 1970s. Alive Questions of class, race and colonisation a problem left to women to solve. Dissolving Ideas, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992, pp. 928–936. to discourses across the decades, Janet are crucial to the intention that Unfinished sexism in turn becomes more unpaid labour for 6 Craig Owens, ‘Posing’, in Difference: On representation and Burchill and Jennifer McCamley’s installation Business should explore urgent contemporary women. Women are sick of solving problems sexuality, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1985, p.7. Aesthetic suicide 2013 reawakens the bristling, intersections of feminist and community men benefit from’.15 Recalling Mierle Laderman incendiary, avant-garde poetics of Valerie issues. Extraordinarily diverse expressions of Ukeles celebrated 1973 performance Washing/ 7 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism, University of Queensland Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto, and its critical these matters are central to the paintings of Tracks/Maintenance – in which the artist washed Press, St. Lucia, 2000. analysis of the position of western women Sandra Hill, the poetry and textual weaving of the floor of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum 8 See, for example, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and under capitalism. Burchill/McCamley’s films Natalie Harkin, the sculptural and performative in Hartford, Connecticut, drawing attention to the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, 1990.

Silver bullets 1982 and SCUM tapes 68– works of Ali Gumillya Baker and Salote Tawale, the invisible, lowly paid underclass of women 9 See Linda Dement, ‘Cyberfeminist Bedsheet’, pp. 68–69, in this 96 1996/2013, accompanied by graphic posters and Cigdem Aydemir’s performative videos and migrants that service cultural institutions publication. and wall texts, are presented alongside copies Extremist activity 2011–12 which explore ideas – Thomas’ inversion of Laderman Ukeles’ 10 Cited in Joanna Walsh, ‘Post-Cyber Feminist International 2017’, of Solanas’ manifesto, first published in 1967, of freedom and constraint in relation to the performance calls upon those with privilege to Frieze, 28 November 2017, accessed at https://frieze.com/article/ post-cyber-feminist-international-2017 which, lamented that ‘no aspect of society complexity of body politics experienced by ‘clean up the mess that is gender discrimination’. being at all relevant to women, there remains Australian Muslim women, playfully amplifying It signals, as Anne Marsh writes of this work, 11 See The Countess Report, http://thecountessreport.com.au/ and Deb Verhoeven’s investigation into gender inequality in to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking stereotypical representations of Islam and ‘that we are still working, still protesting after research funding in Australia, https://www.google.com.au/amp/ amp.abc.net.au/article/9178786, and in the film industry, https:// females only to overthrow the government, the politicising of the veil. The disorienting all these years and it calls on men to stand as theconversation.com/women-arent-the-problem-in-the-film- eliminate the money system, institute complete performance of identity and the polymorphous feminists. To do the work that feminists have industry-men-are-68740. 13 automation, and destroy the male sex’. nature of gender fluidity are today increasingly been doing over and over again during the last 12 One such endeavour is Anne Marsh’s ARC funded research important positions, variously apparent in fifty-plus years in the art world and beyond. It project Art and Feminism in Australia since 1970, which seeks ‘to investigate the impact of feminism on contemporary The archival turn in recent feminist art practice works by Hissy Fit, Archie Barry, Embittered is time for men to lend a hand, to do the work, Australian art and to critically interpret the history of feminism now recuperates these diverse histories as Swish, Spence Messih and Madison Bycroft; not just pay lip service to an imagined feminist and its influence on the ways in which Australian society views representations of women across cultural differences’. http:// 16 important sites of rediscovery, ‘revealing’, as whilst relations of power, sexuality, technology position’. annemarsh.com.au/research_council.php Jude Adams has suggested, ‘fragments or and the media consumption and production 13 Valerie Solanas, S.C.U.M. Manifesto, [1967], accessed at http:// traces of forgotten narratives that when pieced of femininity and womanhood, are embedded kunsthallezurich.ch/sites/default/files/scum_manifesto.pdf 1 For chronologies of Australian feminist art exhibitions, projects together can disrupt established histories in works by Lyndal Walker and Giselle and programs, see Barbara Hall, ‘The women’s liberation 14 See Jude Adams, Remembering The Women’s Show, ACE Open, yielding other meanings, telling other stories’.14 Stanborough. movement and the visual arts: a selected chronology, 1969-90’, Adelaide, 26 August–16 September 2017, accessed at http:// in Catriona Moore (ed.), Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts aceopen.art/exhibitions/remembering-womens-show/ Inter-generational dialogues and archival 1970-1990, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1993, pp. 277–284; excavation are inherent to a number of projects Some venerable feminist icons continue to and the Australian Feminist Art Timeline, accessed at https:// 15 Nat Thomas, Artist’s notes sent in email correspondence, 21 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_feminist_art_timeline November 2017. in Unfinished Business, including Alex Martinis recur: central core imagery representing Roe’s It was about opening the very notion that women’s sexuality appears in Frances (Budden) 2 Cornelia Butler, ‘Art and Feminism: An ideology of shifting 16 Anne Marsh, cited by Nat Thomas in email correspondence, 24 criteria’, in Cornelia Butler (ed.), Whack! Art and the feminist November 2017. there was a particular perspective 2015–17. This Phoenix’s Queen of Spades 1975, in Fiona revolution, MIT Press, Cambridge and London, 2007, p. 15. engages diverse perspectives on the histories Foley’s devastating Black velvet 1996 and 3 1975 was also the year that Laura Mulvey published her now of earlier feminist movements through in Hannah Raisin’s Fold 2015. The casting of canonical essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, (written in 1973), which theorised sexual difference and deconstructed interviews, contemporary footage and archival ‘negative space’ to reveal a sculptural presence the idea of the ‘male gaze’, Juliet Mitchell published film, focussing on a network of alliances which is at the core of Sophie Takách’s Evert Manifold Psychoanalysis and Feminism, and Mary Kelly was conceiving her Post-Partum Document 1973-77. See Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual coalesced around the 1973 ‘Philosophy Strike’ 95cc 2017, a bronze cast of the interior of the Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, vol.16, no.3, 1975, aimed at securing feminist courses at the artist’s vagina, which inverts the idea of the pp. 6–18; and Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Penguin, London, 1975. University of Sydney, spanning members of the phallus as privileged signifier, upsetting the Sydney Filmmakers Cooperative, Feminist Film idea of women characterised in Freudian 4 For Australian contexts, see Sandy Kirby, Sightlines: Women’s Art and Feminist Perspectives in Australia, Craftsman House, Workers and Builders Labourers Federation. terms of absence or ‘lack’ in relation to man’s Sydney, 1992; Catriona Moore (ed.), Dissonance: Feminism And at the heart of the exhibition sits Mary ‘presence’. and the Arts 1970-1990, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1993; and Jacqueline Millner, Catriona Moore & Georgina Cole, ‘Art and Featherston and Emily Floyd’s collaboration Feminism: Twenty-First Century Perspectives’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol. 15, no. 2, 2015, pp. 143-149, The round table 2017. An open-form sculptural The idea of continually doing the arduous, accessed at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/144343 installation and discursive gathering space, it incomplete work of feminism underpins the 18.2015.1089816 is based on a 1977 design by Mary Featherston contentions of Unfinished Business. A reiterating 5 For Jacques Lacan the subject is constituted in language, and for Ripple magazine, inspired by the example image/action over the course of the exhibition in the discourse of patriarchy, which ‘lays down the elementary structures of culture’, in ‘The agency of the letter...’, Ecrits, of feminist collectives, editorial groups and is Nat Thomas’ durational performance Man Tavistock Publications, London, 1977, pp. 147–148; and that community consciousness-raising, which so cleaning up 2017; it features a privileged white the ‘unconscious is constituted by the effects of speech on the subject’ [... and] ‘consequently, the unconscious is structured often issued from the domestic context of the man on his hands and knees cleaning the gallery like a language’, in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho- kitchen table. floor, bucket and scrubbing brush in hand, Analysis, W.W. Norton & Co., New York and London, 1977, p. 149. For Louis Althusser, ideology shapes subjectivity and and wearing a hi-vis vest ‘so we won’t miss identity, with individuals born into, or preceded by ideological state institutions. See Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological his small public gesture’. Thomas notes that State Apparatuses’, [1970], in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood ‘like many gender role expectations, sexism is (eds.), Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing

18 19 Vivienne Binns Mothers’ memories others’ memories 1980 prints, installation, photo-screenprint, printed in colour vitreous enamels, from multiple stencils; prints attached by nylon Vivienne Binns line to anodised steel metal postcard rack Repro vag dens 3 1976 52.0 x 60.0 cm (95 pieces) vitreous enamel on steel Blacktown City Art Collection 40.5 x 30.5 cm 20 Blacktown Arts Centre, Sydney Courtesy the artist 21 Mary Featherston Ripple 1977 (cover design), community childcare newsletter no.11, December 1977 Courtesy the artist 22 Photograph: Fred Kroh 23 UNFINISHED FEMINISM, The first business of feminism is action. included in Unfinished Business.3 For the entire and at variance with itself, because part of itself Purposeful action, deeds as much as words. point of (Budden) Phoenix’s marrying women’s is the knowledge that selves are only parts – UNCEASING ACTIVISM: (And speech is, of course, also action.) The fancywork with vulval imagery was to make always unfixed and unruly’.5 Precisely. Now over AUSTRALIAN ART OVER FIVE point always was, still is, the urgent necessity experimental conjunctions between images and forty years in the making, it’s a rich complex for change. From wage justice to reproductive materials that opened up fresh articulations for brew. And still in progress. DECADES rights, from domestic violence to challenging women, rather than closing them down. sexist representations in the media, from 1 To take one example, see Toni Robertson, Justice for Violet and Julie Ewington representation in legislatures and industry to Nearly twenty years later, Fiona Foley used Bruce Roberts 1980, a large fabric banner now in the collection public recognition of women’s achievements: this same vulval form to make a stinging of the National Museum of Australia, which was used in the ‘Free Violet and Bruce Roberts Campaign’ by the Women Behind Australian feminists have secured social, political denunciation of Australia’s shameful history Bars organisation; this campaign ultimately led to revision of and cultural change at least since the 1880s. of sexual abuse of Aboriginal women, with its laws in NSW regarding provocation to murder in cases of long- standing domestic violence. political freight into the present. In Black Velvet 2 A classic account is Lucy Lippard’s in From the Center: Feminist By the 1970s, activism was central to the newly- 1996, titled for a sexualising nickname given essays on Women’s Art, E. P. Dutton and Co., New York, 1976. formed Australian women’s art groups and to Aboriginal women, she applied the form 3 Frances (Budden) Phoenix died in July 2017 after a long career as an activist, first in Sydney in the 1970s as a poster-maker and actions — from 1973 onwards in Sydney, for on a set of cotton dilly bags, to devastating leading figure in the Women’s Domestic Needlework Group, instance, women made posters for campaigns, effect. Like Phoenix, Foley links gender with then from the 1980s in Adelaide under the name Frances Phoenix, working across various media including painting, banners for demonstrations, and designed labour, but the reiterated bags allude to the embroidery, community arts projects and graphics. 1 leaflets. And as feminism turned artists into many Aboriginal women enslaved in white 4 Fiona Foley, from the unpublished draft manuscript of her activists, this mobilisation also, conversely, households, very often in sexual service. Since PhD thesis Biting the Clouds: The Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, 1897, in progress with spawned new forms of art – new images, the 1980s Foley has consistently investigated Griffith University, 2017, kindly supplied by the artist. materials and methodologies. In an explosion the lived experience of Aboriginal women – 5 See Amelia Groom, ‘~ A’, catalogue essay for Yes and No: Things Learnt About Feminism, Boxcopy, Brisbane, 2014, accessed 6 of commitment-driven innovation, assertion her Stud Gins 2003 is another indictment of November 2017 at https://boxcopy.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/ searched for expression, equally fuelled Australian treatment of Aboriginal women, kelly-doley-yes-and-no.pdf by passion and thoughtfulness. This active counter-posing the ostensible warmth of discursive drive has persisted over subsequent blankets with bald descriptors: Aboriginal; decades, as we see in one key feminist trope: in Women; Property; Defiled; Ravished; Shared; works by Frances (Budden) Phoenix, Fiona Foley Discarded. Both works turn on the use (and and Kelly Doley that deal differently with the abuse) of textiles, stuff associated with classic vaginal or vulval icon. domestic life, which in Foley’s hands are shown to be sad instruments of colonisation. As she For this icon was the site of a struggle for remarks, this body of work was inspired by feminist ways of acting in and on the world. historical accounts of ‘Queensland’s white In the early 1970s, a key feminist affirmation forefathers who perpetrated sexual and of women’s sexual power was embodied in physical violence on Aboriginal men, women this vulval form, then known as ‘central core and children.’4 imagery’ by proponents, like the American Judy Chicago, who were looking for an Through innovative activist intersections authentically female image.2 Female assertion is between the classic female icon and women’s always excellent, and the vulval oval has been needlework, Frances (Budden) Phoenix and celebrated in times and cultures as various Fiona Foley exemplify the rich corpus of feminist as ancient Australian Aboriginal rock carvings ideas and strategies in Australia from the 1970s and modern Italian feminist street marches. until the present. But the last word goes to But the essentialist claim that ‘central core Kelly Doley and her 95 activist-seeming posters imagery’ was inherently female (and therefore collected into Things learnt about feminism 2014. implicitly unchanging) was a lousy rationale Among celebrations of feminist achievement for activism, as Frances (Budden) Phoenix and and campaign slogans, one reads ‘Central Core Marie McMahon demonstrated when they – No More?’ on a pink ground. And another resisted Chicago’s canonical ‘central core’ proclaims ‘Yes to Contradictions’: with its bold imagery, as well as her authoritarian working graphics and bright fluoro colours, the work is an practices, with knowing resistant play – look at endorsement of activism, but it’s also a tribute no goddesses no mistresses (anarcho-feminism) to the density of contemporary feminism. As 1978 and OUR STORY/HERSTORY? Working Amelia Groom noted, Doley’s work is ‘a portrait on… Judy Chicago’s ‘Dinner Party’ 1982, both of feminism as difference; full of contradictions

24 25

Frances (Budden) Phoenix Frances (Budden) Phoenix Get your abortion laws off our bodies 1980 Queen of spades 1975 filet crochet milk-jug cover, pink beads, (previously known as Kunda 1976) carpet fragment mounted on board found doily on cotton, plastic zipper 27.0 x 36.0 cm 50.0 x 42.0 x 3.0 cm Collection of the Estate of the artist Collection of Toni Robertson, Sydney 26 Photograph: Andrew Curtis Photograph: Andrew Curtis 27 Fiona Foley Black velvet 1996 cotton fabric with cotton appliqué 9 bags: 99.0 x 20.0 cm (with handle, each); 180.0 x 200.0 cm (overall dimensions variable) Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of 28 Modern Art, Brisbane 29 Kelly Doley Things learnt about feminism #1–95 2014 (details) ink on card 95 sheets, each 60.0 x 52.0 cm Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art 30 University of Western Australia 31 THANK YOU ‘How would you describe your feminism?’ the many productive conversations along the way: artist asks, as I sit down. We are in a suburban with my curatorial colleagues,15 with artists,16 Annika Kristensen café, strangers at this point, and the provoca- with friends and family.17 For every one story, tion hangs in midair like a challenge. It’s a good there is another. For every argument, a count- question, and not one that I had a ready answer er-argument. What appears to me to be import- for.1 My feminism changes daily, as I do. ant is that we are heard, and that we listen. The world around us changes in fast and often Later, I find myself in another café, with yet an- complicated ways. And while feminism can be other artist. She is close to my mother’s age and contested and conflicting, it can also offer a has a daughter around mine. There is a softness helpful language to discuss the injustices and about her, but I sense that has not always been inequalities that women continue to face. As the the case. ‘Your generation are much kinder than movement grows to encompass an expanded we were. We were so angry all the time’, she agenda, and to address the intersectional and says. I leave wondering if I should be angrier, lived experiences of women, genderqueer and and silently thanking her generation for the role transgender people with diverse racial, cultural that they have played in some of the reasons and economic circumstances, the need to attend why I am not.2 to ‘unfinished business’ is evermore pressing. There is still more work to be done, and until it Of course I am, at times, angry – sometimes is, we should all be feminists.18 even furious.3 We should all be. Anger brings about change. But as women we are told that 1 Thank you Ainslie Templeton 2 Thank you Helen Grace anger is unbecoming. We are conditioned from 3 Thank you Kate Just childhood to be quiet and courteous, praised for 4 Thank you Linda Marrinon colouring between the lines. Consequently, I am 5 Thank you Frances (Budden) Phoenix 4 also, all too often, sorry – a fact, that in itself, 6 Thank you Shevaun Wright quietly makes me mad. 7 Thank you Virginia Fraser and Elvis Richardson 8 Thank you Narelle Desmond Mostly, I am dismayed. Dismayed, that in 2017 – 9 Thank you Fiona Foley despite our celebrations and victories – women 10 Thank you Natalie Thomas around the world are still fighting for reproduc- 11 Thank you Maria Kozic tive freedom;5 still the victims of rape and other 12 Thank you Archie Barry forms of violence, that are defined, and at times 13 Thank you Ali Baker 14 Thank you Sarah Goffman legitimised, by a patriarchal legal system;6 still 15 Thank you Elvis, Julie, Paola, Vikki and Max arguing for equal representation and pay in the 16 Thank you all 7 workforce; still sexualised from childhood – and 17 Thanks mum! then demonised for exploring or expressing 18 Thank you Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie their sexuality;8 still challenging stereotypes of racialised sexuality;9 still beholden to the mirror;10 still encountering damaging represen- tations of themselves in popular culture and the media;11 still reconciling that their non-bi- nary gender is largely absent from that same media;12 still having their own histories written about or erased, as they continue to suffer the ongoing effects of colonisation;13 still needing to take to the streets, to defiantly protest the rights of women as human rights.14

In the course of planning this exhibition I have returned often to the question asked of me by the artist in that suburban café, and sought to define my understanding of feminism both as a movement and a term. This has resulted in

32 33 Linda Marrinon Kate Just Sorry! 1982 Furious 2015 synthetic polymer paint on canvas neon text, black paint 59.5 x 87.5 x 4.5 cm 20.0 x 59.0 x 5.0 cm Collection: Museum of Contemporary Art 34 City of Port Phillip Collection, Melbourne Australia, Sydney 35 Narelle Desmond SLUTbag 2008 vinyl, pvc, plastic, card 110.0 x 220.0 cm 36 Courtesy the artist 37 Maria Kozic Bitch 1990 screen printed billboard dimensions variable 38 Courtesy the artist 39 I CAN’T BELIEVE I STILL On 21 January this year, an estimated five Invisible narratives and unheard voices are about opening the very notion that there was million people world-wide took part in the brought to the fore in Natalie Harkin’s haunting a particular perspective 2015–17, which centres HAVE TO PROTEST THIS Women’s March. Galvanised in response to the Archive Fever Paradox [2] 2014, which aims to around a strike at the University of Sydney FUCKING SHIT inauguration of Donald Trump as U.S. President, disrupt and rupture the colonial archive. In the in 1973 that ultimately saw the philosophy some 673 events across each of the seven work, the artist literally weaves together ’official’ department split, allowing a proposed – and Vikki McInnes continents advocated for women’s rights and texts – South Australian Aboriginal affairs controversial – feminist course to proceed. While other human rights issues including race legislation, Children’s Welfare Board case files Martinis Roe brings little known histories of equality and Indigenous rights, LGBTIQ rights, and Aborigines Protection Board correspondence Australian feminism to light through her work, immigration and healthcare reforms. The actions on her own family – with stories from the she also aims to raise contemporary feminist were conceived to recognise and highlight women in her family themselves. Further she consciousness and facilitate inter-generational that equality on numerous social and political engages both Indigenous and non-Indigenous feminist dialogues to think about possible fronts remains elusive for women and for many archival modes, in both the spoken and the feminist futures. minority groups. written word, to negotiate new positions of agency. Harkin notes in relation to the work: Dialogue between and among feminists is Artist Sarah Goffman has transformed these ‘Our voices may have been missing, but our also the basis of Kelly Doley’s Things learnt live events into an archive of feminist activity resistance carries forward.’2 about feminism 2014. Comprising a suite of in I am with you 2017, a vast installation 95 hand-painted posters, the work developed of handmade cardboard placards, bearing Racist texts 2014/17 by Harkin’s Unbound out of a series of one-on-one conversations in slogans from the protests themselves. With Collective collaborator, Ali Gumillya Baker which Doley asked a number of participants its accumulation of aestheticised statements, functions as the dark heart of this exhibition. An from different backgrounds to teach her about Goffman converts action into artwork, and archive of Indigenous representation, many of feminism. In a mode similar to that of Goffman, agenda into legacy. Among the hundreds of the hundreds of books collected and presented she has transcribed the encounter between slogans brandished during the marches, a sign by Baker feature palpably shocking titles such artist and participant into a feminist archive of reading ‘I can’t believe I still have to protest as Down Among the Wild Men and The Sexual thought and imagination. this fucking shit’ has become iconic both as Life of Savages while others are more insidious image and as symbolic of what still remains in their racist content. Including both historical Elizabeth Gower’s Portrait of the artist as a unresolved with regards to the projects of and contemporary examples, Racist texts serves young woman 1974–ongoing presents a quite second and third wave feminists. as a stark reminder that racialised difference – literal archive: a history of a woman’s life, lived and the concomitant discrepancies in power, in art. The vast project (from which a selection In Time Binds, Elizabeth Freedman asserts experience and material conditions rendered by of some 50 images is presented here) not only that artistic engagements (queer, feminist this difference – necessarily remains at the centre documents Gower and her artwork over the etc.) with history are most compelling when of our unfinished business in Australia. past four decades, but also alludes to the social they look to mine the present for ‘signs of and structural forces that impinge on it. With undetonated energy from past revolutions’ The disjuncture between official policy and its glancing asides, Portrait of the artist as a rather than simply avowing nostalgia for those women’s experience is also highlighted by young woman provides an alternative historical past revolutionary moments themselves.1 Shevaun Wright in The rape contract 2016, narrative and invites us to consider what Certainly, this notion of undetonated energy which interpolates personal narrative into a remains ‘unfinished’ in feminist discourses, resonates keenly though numerous practices legal archive and framework. In annotating activisms and practices in Australia over the represented in Unfinished Business, and an amended commercial services contract period. Indeed, unorthodox histories, narratives many of the artists have engaged archives in with the words of her friend – a rape and languages run rampant throughout various ways to position the past in meaningful survivor – Wright seeks to subvert systemic Unfinished Business as its artists mine and and transformative relationships with the and institutionalised discrimination. Her repurpose the archive to protest, focus and present. They activate the archive not only as feminist (and post-colonial) critique of the law reimagine our feminist past, present and future. a conceptual space in which to rethink time, emphasises the tenuous contract between the 1 Elizabeth Freedman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer history and progress against the grain of body politic, the social body and our individual Histories, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2010, p. dominant narratives and ideologies, but also as bodies to devastating effect. xvi.

a framework through which to continue making 2 Natalie Harkin in Bound and Unbound: Sovereign Acts, and legitimising forms of knowledge and Of course, as a key philosophical and ideological Yunggorendi First Nations Centre, Flinders University, Adelaide, 2014, p. 20. cultural production that are otherwise rendered movement of the 20th century, feminism invisible and deemed untenable. continues to influence the way we think about social and political domains as well as the ways we make and understand art. Alex Martinis Roe uses archival methods and materials in It was

40 41 Alex Martinis Roe It was about opening the very notion that there was a particular perspective 2015–17 three-channel video installation, HD video and 16mm film 33:02 mins (total running time) 42 Courtesy the artist 43 Elizabeth Gower Portrait of the artist as a young Following pages: woman 1974–2017 Sarah Goffman photographs and digital prints I am with you 2017 (detail) dimensions variable cardboard, permanent marker Courtesy the artist, Sutton Gallery, dimensions variable 44 Melbourne and Milani Gallery, Brisbane Courtesy the artist 45 Linda Dement, #60 (Thesis II) 2015, jute, wool, 46 modelling clay, bamboo, 256.0 x 143.5 cm 47 BLAK FEMALE FUTURISMS ‘Don’t let your racism drive your feminism’ removed. Aboriginal women will suffer thirty- like Aunty Edna Brown advocated for her people stated artist, activist and Aboriginal warrior four times the amount of violence than white to be housed properly, to have health care, AND YTE FEMINISM WAVES woman Arika Walau to the gathering of women will.5 We are not protected by the dignity in death and burial, and, ultimately, social predominantly white women who attended colony and its so called justice system based justice. With their example, I can only hope that Paola Balla the Matriarchs Speak panel as part of on a false ‘democracy that does not hold for a new future female authority can be imagined the Sovereignty public programs at ACCA in us’, as curator and researcher Kimberley Kruger across cultures, as an antidote to whiteness, early 2017.1 When we as black women are at stated in relation to colonial injury and repair male violence and colonisation, towards a our most honest, we are often at our most of Peoples and Country.6 She related this to healing of the ongoing traumas and injuries that vulnerable. There is no pretense in refusing the well-being of basket grass weaving by damage. white feminism, we are not denouncing the master weaver Patricia Harrison. Art and acts rights of other women, but are choosing and of reciprocity can be processes for repair from stating our own way of being as sovereign ongoing colonial injuries, if they are self- 1 Meriki Onus, Matriarchs’ Speak, symposium, Australian Centre Aboriginal women warriors, as academic Tracey determined. for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 4 March 2017. Bunda asserts.2 2 Tracy Bunda, ‘The sovereign Aboriginal woman’, in Aileen Moreton-Robinson (ed.), Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous In The rape contract 2016, artist and Sovereignty Matters. Allen and Unwin, Crows Nest, 2007, pp. I do not identify as a feminist. Feminism has lawyer Shevaun Wright starkly addresses 75-85. failed us, as it was not designed for us. I say how continued marginalisation and distortion 3 Margaret Tucker, If everyone cared: autobiography of Margaret this with awareness that I am a co-curator of of black and female voices within the legal Tucker M.B.E., Sydney, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1977, pp. 49-52. a show about art and feminism, and stand in and art spheres continues. As I’m considering 4 Ali Gumillya Baker, Paola Balla, Kimberley Moulton and Nicole my black matriarchal knowing and doing with perceived glass ceilings and the reality of Monks, Next Matriarch: Panel Discussion, ACE Open, Adelaide, 15 October 2017. this work. Our shared womanhood does not concrete jail floors, rations and child removal, 5 Bianca Hall, ‘Aboriginal women 34 times more likely to suffer make us sisters with white women. Gender I’m keenly aware, as Taylor Crumpton has family violence, but fear reporting it,’ The Age, 12 July 2015, does not trump race in Australia in 2017, and it noted, that black women can be known and accessed at http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/aboriginal- women-34-per-cent-more-likely-to-suffer-family-violence-but- did not negate race when white frontier women empowered in intersectionality – a term fear-reporting-it-20150709-gi8iwm> turned their backs on us during the Frontier developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw 6 Kimberley Kruger, Kader Attia Symposium: La Colonie (SUD), Wars, when their men raped our women in 1993 to describe the oppression individuals Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 11 and children, and stole Aboriginal children, face due to their position in society – November 2017. 3 including young girls like Aunty Marg Tucker, ‘composed of various class backgrounds, sexual 7 Taylor Crumpton, ‘How Black Women Have Impacted Feminism to clean their homes, cook their food, grow and orientations, and voices [...] From speaking Over Time’, Teen Vogue, 21 September 2017, accessed at https:// www.teenvogue.com/story/how-black-women-have-impacted- tend their gardens, wash their clothes, and look about issues of empowerment and suffrage to feminism-over-time

after their children as ‘domestics’. making the connections between race, ability 8 Pauline Whyman, spoken word performance, Fem&Ist Film and gender into conversations around equality, Festival, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, 22 November 2017. White women have not been passive, benign black women have long been teaching about benefactors. They have actively participated the multifaceted and interlocking systems of 9 Pauline Whyman (director), Back Seat 2007, Scarlett Pictures Pty Ltd, Sydney, 2007. in the colonising and brutalising of Aboriginal oppressions that effected marginalised people.’7 people, as Aboriginal women’s herstories tell. When Ali Gumillya Baker and I sat in At the Fem&Ist Film Festival 2017, actor and conversation about the exhibition Next director Pauline Whyman named her ‘childless Matriarch, my breath caught when she said she womb as a warzone and her heart as a partial ‘was unable to articulate the depth of grief and warzone, because she needs to let some light despair enacted on the Aboriginal women’s body in to have hope’.8 In this moment she named in this country’.4 White Australia is yet to address both historical, inter-generational, and fresh the impacts of this violence. Baker’s stack wounds. She is a member of the Stolen of Racist texts 2014/17 is a haunting and startling Generations and speaks her story through manifestation of the depth, or ‘height’, of racism twelve-year-old girls’ eyes in her acclaimed short in this country and the structural violence filmBack Seat.9 enacted on Aboriginal women, men and children on a daily basis. We have the ongoing daily work of resistance. Preceding the first waves of feminism, Aboriginal The ongoing privilege of white women and Torres Strait Islander women did the continues. Indigenous women face a lower life unrecognised work of protesting the stealing of expectancy, a greater chance of experiencing their children, and the condition on missions, family violence, and of having our children reserves and streets like Fitzroy, where leaders

48 49 Ali Gumillya Baker Racist texts 2014 stack of books 800.0 cm (height) 50 Courtesy the artist 51 Natalie Harkin Archive fever paradox [2]/whitewash- brainwash 2014 video projection with sound video loop: Ali Gumillya Baker, Denys Finney and Daniel Phillis sound: Bradley Harkin 52 Courtesy the artist 53 Shevaun Wright The rape contract 2016 14 sheets of paper, wooden boxes, UV ink, torches 36.0 x 27.0 cm (each frame) Courtesy the artist and MARS Gallery, 54 Melbourne 55 Atong Atem Atong Atem Barber 2017 Cattle herder 2017 digital print digital print 21.0 x 15.0 cm 15.0 x 21.0 cm 56 Courtesy the artist Courtesy the artist 57 WHEN ART MEETS FEMINISM Elvis Richardson

When I first heard the term ‘post-feminism’ I interpreted it as some kind of crazy claim that feminism was over; job done, goal achieved, moving on. What I have learned to understand is that ‘post-feminism’ was signalling the new and necessary ways feminism is changing. Feminism today is examining and identifying its own prejudices and discriminations, enabling deeper questioning of gender essentialism and recognising intersectional discrimination, racism and colonialist institutional legacies are integral to leading the way to creating change and the possibility of an ethical future.

58 59 Pros and cons of exhibitions with all a huge deal How big a deal is an women, non-binary and gender be the first exhibition with all non-conforming artists. museu m or women, non-binary and gallery to do perfect an all gender non-conforming oppor- women Pros import- values because tunity to non-bi- artists? ant and occupy- you add nary matri- pays ing won’t import- and archal close cultural even ant gender and atten- space notice works non queer tion to and there to our con- narra- diversi- having a are no museu form- tives ty and voice in men in m ing un- inclu- history the collec- exhibi- packed sion matters show tions tion If they when when only media critical not much happen cover- review once a age is is of a deal decade non sidelin- existent ing not very Frequency of exhibitions with all all the often women, non-binary and gender time non- conforming artists Cons

CoUNTess.blogspot.com was launched on the back cover of the catalogue for an all-women show, Girls, Girls, Girls – curated by Nat Thomas and Lyndal Walker at the Carlton Hotel in Melbourne, 2008. For elles@centrepompidou: Women artists in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art at the decades all-women shows have been championed by artist run galleries, university and regional galleries Centre Pompidou in 2009 was a serious first in all-women shows. The fact that curator Camille and independent CAOS galleries. It was a huge influence as an art student seeing the all-women Morineau’s ambitious project was not only to stage a show of women artists from the modernist exhibition Frames of Reference: Aspects of Feminism and Art, curated by Sally Couacaud at Artspace and Pier period, but that they had to be works held in the Pompidou’s collection, was genius. In one fell 4/5 Walsh Bay in 1991. Deeper into the ‘90s and early 2000s feminist art practices and concerns were swoop Morineau’s elles exposed and changed the museum’s exhibition and collecting practices. elles sidelined and out of fashion – reviews of the 51st Venice Biennale, The Experience of Art, criticised the first ever involved years of research, to locate and acquire many of the works for exhibition, showing the female curatorial directors, who situated enormous banners at the entrance to the curated exhibition museum’s significant commitment to readdressing the contribution of women artists as central to featuring the witty gender equity art-world facts of the Guerilla Girls. These, among many other feminist the story of art of the 20th and 21st centuries. artworks presented throughout the show, were considered passé and irrelevant, if the reviews were anything to go by, which largely focused on the regular male heroes, ignoring or unable to see the feminist In 2016, the new director of Tate Modern, Frances Morris, declared her intention to focus on thread. (eg: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2005/jun/14/1) women and under-represented artists in the museum’s exhibition programming. Everyone took notice when Morris used her position to address these historical imbalances, and already she has Then in 2007 two important international feminist exhibitions were staged. WACK: Art and the Feminist distinguished the Tate Modern amongst the Tate’s suite of art museums. During this same period, Revolution, curated by Connie Butler at the Geffen Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los only two major state museums in Australia have staged feminist surveys or deliberate all-women Angeles, and Global Feminisms, curated by Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin, which launched the new exhibitions – Contemporary Australia: Women, curated by Julie Ewington at QAGOMA in 2012, as part Elizabeth Sackler Centre for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Both exhibitions of their Australian survey series, and more recently Who’s Afraid of Colour at the NGV in 2016. In the surveyed the legacies of feminist art in the late 20th century, establishing undeniable connections to the opening sentence to the NGV catalogue, Judith Ryan states one of the compelling reasons for ways that we understand contemporary art today, in relation to identity-based art, performance, all-women and gender non-conforming exhibitions: ‘In 1981 the National Gallery of Victoria multi-disciplinary and craft based practices, mediums and materials, (such as textiles and ceramics), staged Aboriginal Australia, a major exhibition of 328 works that did not include a single exhibit by activist art, institutional critique, collecting-based practices, and more. a named woman artist.’

60 61 Virginia Fraser and Elvis Richardson FEMMO no. 4 2015 and FEMMO no. 1 2014 screen print on cotton 140.0 x 110.0 cm 62 Courtesy the artists 63 Carole Wilson Jillposters (print workshop) Strike while the Iron’s hot 1987 Susan Bruce screenprint, oil based inks Queer rights are human rights 2017 76.0 x 51.0 cm FRAN FEST Poster Project (portfolio) University of Melbourne Art Collection digital print Gift of Dr Carole D. Wilson 59.5 x 42.0 cm 64 Photographer: Lee McRae Courtesy the artist and FRAN FEST 65 Desiree Tahiri Desiree Tahiri The representation of women in the current The cat lady 2017 Australian artworld 2017 photocopied and assembled collage photocopied and assembled collage including cat hair, handmade paper, including cardboard, tin foil, paint, fabric, charcoal, paint, pen and typed, cut and typed words, and images from magazines pasted words bound with thread 11.5 x 16.5 x 0.5 cm 10.5 x 14.5 x 1.0 cm 66 Courtesy the artist Courtesy the artist 67 Sadie Chandler The weight of images 2017 (detail) ink on paper, paste 1120.0 x 420.0 cm 68 Courtesy the artist and Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne 69 CYBERFEMINIST BEDSHEET • holes ripped by Pussy Riot • Jessie Boylan’s scrape of earth revealing a and Aileen Wuornos. That same clarity, filtered, • the sticky trace of gummi lollies from small footprint in toxic glow drives into Hissy Fit’s headbanging, and further Linda Dement Angela Goh • day-glo from Poly Styrene into the restrained, considered poetic fury of Gabi Briggs reclaiming her territory. • holographic nail polish and fermenting • garlic and girl cum from Shu Lea Cheang A terrain of cyberfeminism, punk, rebellious kefir from Holly Childs • the black ink outline of a tool to dismantle The live material intelligence permeating the aberration and corporeal digital transgression • Hélène Cixous’ biro marks in anxious the master’s house from Audre Lorde bedsheet takes its shifting form in artworks is mapped as a rumpled unclean bedsheet. perfect overlapping words from which and eruptions as it ceaselessly expands and Linear timelines cannot hold or even hint • wine and whiteboard marker from Kelly small sharp steel daggers grow outwards decays. It will undoubtedly submerge again; at the festering yeast growth, circuit-wired Doley to pierce your heart pressed under by thought-fashion trends in organism of cyberfeminism. It coagulated and • Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic lines of flight that art, philosophy, pop-culture, politics; but also it sparked in the reject-outsider mutiny, trauma- • Claude Cahun’s careful scalpel cuts snake and undulate in fine steel cable will perpetually distend and accrete with new jouissance and fast hard beat of queer punk. It exposing an eye forces. Cyberfeminism remains unreliable, found visible existence, a name, a voice and a • drops of solder & small wires vibrating in a • Nina Hagen’s eyeliner, Diamanda Galás’ unformed, unfinished. No end result, no list manifesto, through VNS Matrix in the (typical) frequency of soothing from Pia van Gelder eyeliner, Lydia Lunch’s eyeliner of Cyberfeminist principles nor resolution of Adelaide heat wave of 1991. • sterile cell media and raw blood from argued contentions is possible. Clean ironed • Jasmine Hirst’s eyeliner in a halo of Cynthia Verspaget white expanses of didactic proscriptions and Those sweaty tendrils shoot outwards and spattered blood stains and cigarette burns • Shulamith Firestone’s psych drugs ground restrictions are forever ruined. Nothing here inwards from innumerable ante, post and trans- • gun powder residue from the hands of and pressed into the weave by strong is clean and whole and no part of it will ever cedants. The bedsheet bears smears and stains Valerie Solanas tormented fingers stiffen into certainty. from productive encounters, convergences • burn marks from Gabi Briggs and brush pasts. It has been endlessly folded, • a hole onto infinite black nothing, rimmed scrunched, wrung out and smoothed flat in • sweat and blood encrusted hair from Hissy with an ultra violet glow, from Laboria spawning, leaching and adulterating across Fit’s head banging Cuboniks feminist time and creative persuasions. • Thames mud from The Slits • all the holes that were there all along • dog-spider-human-spit mix from Donna (and upon which every product of Cyberfeminism, as blurred edge range, entangles Haraway representation is premised), the gaps in carnality with code; machines, blood and bad the warp and weft of the sheet itself, from language; poetry and disdain; executables, • dog-hair-human-colostrum mix from Sarah Amy Ireland theft and creative fabrication. It incites and Waterson • Kathy Acker’s pubic hair, soaked in the follows lines of flight powered by contradiction, • 2 long dark hairs morphing into audio tears that mourn her relatedness, transgression and misbehaviour. cables from Allucquére Rosanne Stone It simultaneously embraces logic and unreason, • Orlan’s surgically repositioned fat The bedsheet smells. It stinks with a living giving the finger to binaries as it ravishes them. fester of gases and ferment that have evolved • blood from r e a from the many peculiar mergings and On this yellowed worn bedsheet we find: • masking tape from Jill Scott infections. VNS Matrix can be directly flat • spilt massage oil in film sprocket shapes pressed into Sadie Plant, pushed in a second • g-slime from VNS Matrix from Margie Medlin firm fold onto Xeno-feminism then shaken • Sadie Plant’s cigarette ash forming loose. The immaculate aberrations of Jean • blackness and weight from Debra Petrovich minuscule zeroes and ones, alive, tumbling Genet can be rubbed hard along Testo Junkie replicating and scattering, some stuck in • an unnamed stain that doesn’t remain but and St Teresa of Avila, who in turn is joined the hem edges spewing their divisions lasts infinitely from Michele Barker & Anna at the hip to Francesca da Rimini | Doll Yoko. onto the floor Munster Dissonance and affirmative criticality wick • more numbers, pink, from the CoUNTess • turmeric yellow curry stains left by Frances along fibres between Rosi Braidotti and the Barrett eating in bed performance events of Kelly Doley. Gentle • snot, tears and spit from Virginia Barratt in spatters of radionics and odd science sprout • the chalk outline of Ana Mendieta productive panic the circuitry and noise of Pia van Gelder, whose • black grease from the prison lock that • Spence Messih’s spit invisible energies resonate into entrainment failed to hold Albertine Sarrazin • a rats’ nest of cables and jade green nail with those of Nancy Mauro-Flude, who in • faint blue flower Iranian tea stains from polish from Nancy Mauro-Flude turn pulls Ada Lovelace and Anne Bonny into Doll Yoko a séance of data flows. The virulent clarity of • desert sand from the boots of Isabelle mad brilliant Valerie Solanas charges in arterial • milk from Bataille & Laure Eberhardt spurts of facts and outrage via Jasmine Hirst

70 71 Linda Dement Feminist methodology machine 2016 three-channel video variable duration 72 Courtesy the artist 73 Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley Janet Burchill and SCUM tapes 68–96 1996 (re-edited 2013) Jennifer McCamley (stills) Aesthetic suicide 2017 SuperVHS transferred to digital format digital poster 22:00 mins 70.0 x 50.0 cm Courtesy the artist and Neon Parc, Courtesy the artist and Neon Parc, 74 Melbourne Melbourne 75 Spence Messih with Vincent Silk THESE THINGS WE DO/LONG LIVE Spence Messih Spence Messih SNAILS 2017 You move (on the other side of) 2017 River beneath the river (I & II) 2017 text on paper, steel shelf steel, testosterone gel Cyanotype on watercolour paper 21.0 x 29.7 cm dimensions variable 56.0 x 76.0 cm 76 Courtesy the artists Courtesy the artist Collection: Artbank, Sydney 77 Hissy Fit 19.12.15 2015 digital video 60:00 mins 78 Courtesy the artists 79 HISTORY IS A SOFT CLAY playful approach towards narratives of the ‘sulu’. At the same time she narrated – with and canonical art history – to time-travel past is evident in the practice of Melbourne- impeccable comedic timing – the story of her backwards and forwards in multiple directions. MEDIUM: EUGENIA LIM based artist Eugenia Lim, whose work I will painful first bra-shopping trip with her mother This productive interrogation of history creates AND SALOTE TAWALE consider in dialogue with Tawale’s. In recent and sister in suburban Melbourne. During the new artistic subjects that, again to borrow years Lim has performed under the guise of performance Tawale ignored the audience and Hall’s words, ‘belong to the future as much as Laura Castagnini The Ambassador, a feminist adaptation of addressed only a video camera setup onstage, to the past’.7 Tseng Kwong Chi’s East Meets West series, thus theatricalising the conditions of creating a persona who first appeared in a gold Mao performative video practice alone in a bedroom A postcard by the artist Salote Tawale hangs on suit wandering through the ‘living history’ or studio. 1 Salote Tawale, in the introduction to her self-published book, Salote Tawale, 2017, p. 2. the wall above my desk; entitled The Bust 2014, museum of Sovereign Hill in Ballarat. Entitled Tawale’s homage to Mogul was at the invitation 2 See Geoffrey J. Wallis, Peril in the Square: The sculpture that the photograph presents a classical sculpture Yellow peril 2015, this performative video of Lim and myself when we commissioned challenged a city, Indra Publishing, Melbourne, 2005. of the artist’s head and neck, set against a grey re-appropriates the racist nickname given to artists to make a new live work in response to 3 Memory Screens was held at the Australian Centre for background. Every morning, after walking the infamously unpopular public sculpture the Moving Image, Melbourne, as part of CHANNELS: The a video work of their choice from the 1970s.3 Australian Video Art Festival, 2013. through the grand columned entrance of Tate Vault 1980 by Ron Robertson-Swann that was This strategy is one that Lim has undertaken 4 ‘Performing Feminism ‘Badly’: Hotham Street Ladies and Brown Britain, I enter my office and sit down face- eventually re-housed outside the Australian Council’, n.paradoxa, vol.36, 2015, pp. 23–31. Republished 2 in her own artistic practice: Lim’s 2014 video to-face with Tawale’s image. Her expression is Centre for Contemporary Art. Lim’s Yellow in OnCurating, no.29, 2016, http://www.on-curating.org/issue- Maternal semiotics saw the heavily pregnant 29-reader/performing-feminism-badly-hotham-street-ladies- calm and stoic, yet the eyes stare accusingly peril was exhibited alongside two digital and-brown-council.html#.Wf-UoROCxYc. artist re-imagine Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of into mine. Tawale’s eyes ask me what sorts of images printed on to unfolded gold emergency 5 Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Identity: the kitchen 1975, while in 2012 Lim performed faces are engraved into the historical sculptures blankets. The first depicts a tourist photograph Community, Culture, Difference, Lawrence & Wishart, London, Narcissus, a durational response to her own 1990, p. 225. that line the gallery walls in which I work, and of the ‘Ambassador’ holding the largest gold live-feed video image that sought to ‘perfect’ 6 Ibid. whose hands have been given the honour of nugget ever found, known as the ‘Welcome freeze-frames of Marina Abramovic’s Art 7 Ibid. inscribing them. Simultaneously, they ask me Stranger’. As the ‘Welcome Stranger’ was found must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful what it means to display a body that is ‘Other’ by Cornish miner John Deason in 1869, Lim’s 1975. I have argued elsewhere that a defining – that is, not white, male and heterosexual citation parodies white anxieties evident in characteristic of contemporary feminist art is – within the imperial framing inherent to all the ‘Yellow Peril’ construct by suggesting that the citational tendency to homage or parody museums. the time-travelling Ambassador has magically intercepted great wealth otherwise due to a the aesthetic and conceptual strategies of 4 The postcard originated in a performance- member of the colonial ruling class. The second earlier feminisms. Lim’s and Tawale’s re- based installation entitled Colonising digital image reproduces a 1980 photograph performances of selected second-wave feminist West Space in which Tawale negotiated the taken of Lim’s young parents standing in front artworks certainly display this tendency. architecture of a contemporary gallery in of Vault soon after their arrival in Melbourne However, as artists whose work explores the Melbourne through her placement of sculptural in that year. The juxtaposition of Chinese- diasporic condition, Lim and Tawale’s temporal objects, photographic imagery and what the Singaporean bodies set against a now-iconic registers are also necessarily geographical. artist calls ‘colour branding’. In essence a self- sculpture that is forever linked in nickname Their work traces family histories of migration mythologising project, Colonising West Space to the xenophobic fear of Chinese and Asian backwards through time and, as seen by both traced the artist’s bodily presence to create presence in Australia creates a powerful image: artists’ recent undertaking of residencies in an alternative history of the space. Tawale has at once painful, defiant and ironic. their ancestral ‘motherlands’, along a physical since disseminated the postcards widely, giving journey to a place of cultural origins. Yet, as them to friends and strangers whom she invites Lim and Tawale are united in their privileging theorist Stuart Hall argues, while cultural to ‘colonise’ further spaces by placing an image of personal narrative and family histories to identities have histories, they also ‘undergo of her body in new contexts. The postcard’s displace Western art historical mythologies. constant transformation’.5 He elaborates: ‘Far circulation speaks to the condition of ‘diasporic More specifically, their work re-addresses the from being grounded in mere “recovery” of the indigeneity’ that informs Tawale’s practice. As dominance of white artists in mainstream past, which is waiting to be found, and which she asserts: ‘Foregrounding the experience accounts of second wave feminist video and when found, will secure our sense of ourselves of a translated Indigeneity, the condition of performance art. In her first live work, Dressing into eternity, identities are the names we give my practice is one that is removed from land up (Ode to Mogul) 2013, Tawale reimagined to the different ways we are positioned by, and and separated from traditional practices, and the reverse striptease in Susan Mogul’s 1973 position ourselves within, the narratives of the consequently repositioned within immigrant performative video by inserting a racialised past.6 Tawale and Lim’s practices do not aim to histories’.1 narrative. Beginning naked, Tawale slowly unearth a fixed notion of cultural identity – a dressed into what she describes as a ‘totemic true ‘Fijian-ness’ or ‘Chinese-ness’ – and insert History, for Tawale, is not set in stone: it version of herself’: white and pink face-paint, it like a bookmark into existing accounts of is a soft clay medium, malleable, to be re- a head-dress of spooled VHS tape, and a art history. Rather, their practices play with shaped according to her whims. A similarly spray-painted handmade version of a Fijian different kinds of histories – family, feminist,

80 81 Salote Tawale Salote Tawale Cooking together 2017 (still) Performing invisibility 2015 (still) video video 82 Courtesy the artist Courtesy the artist 83 Eugenia Lim Timmah in the library Woman’s Work 2017 (series) framed giclee prints on photo rag 5 diptychs: 119.0 x 84.0 cm (each panel) 84 Courtesy the artist 85 Cigdem Aydemir Extremist activity (Swing) 2012 (still) HD video, silent 2:49 mins 86 Courtesy the artist 87 Archie Barry Hypnic 2017 (details) live performance 4:00 mins (approx.) Courtesy the artist 88 Photograph: Vanessa Godden 89 Madison Bycroft All the ills that flesh is heir to 2017 (stills) digital video, colour, sound 15:00 mins 90 Courtesy the artist 91 WOMEN WITH US original women Would the market be more ethical without The photo was taken on our back steps. the paint that comes from the killing fields of Ellen van Neerven ‘Feminism is not going to be the central Cambodia? Does white art always come at a cost At the institution I meet sis Natalie Harkin and way in which Aboriginal women understand to the environment? Without reckless ways of other artists in the Unbound collective visiting themselves’, said Marlene Longbottom and working, we could be close to achieving some from Kaurna land: Ali Gumillya Baker (curator) Evelyn Araluen in-conversation at Feminist sort of balance. The input will match the output. who works in film, performance, projection and Interventions, Feminist Impacts at the University grandmother-stories to shift the colonial gaze, of Wollongong earlier this year. I did a residency in an art gallery once. I shared Simone Ulalka Tur and Faye Rosas Blanch. Like space. I went to bed. I was haunted. There the tall stack of books in Baker’s Racist texts In these contexts we are all fighting to be were many noises. I think about the lighting 2014/17 their wall-to-ceiling approach exposes recognised as original women, decendants of up of objects for no-one to see. The care for art the dark shadows of the nation’s invader history. an original movement. In our ways we reference space (exactly 19 degrees) compared to many others that have come before us and their the artist’s space. When we are in the institutions together we words. The Archive is in Country. hold hands, we are together. We move through What tributaries are underneath this gallery and a floating past. English can’t define us – Indigenous Aboriginal without these colonial cultural centres would female – these words can’t go very far, they don’t our centres and religions be more respected? In the late ‘90s Harkin began looking at the go the distance to describe how beautiful and colonial archive – starting in the Aboriginal complex I/we can be/will be/have been. For what Whitefellas found a comfortable belonging State Records of South Australia; her work we are, for all our future genders, lovers and fam. here through a psychology of denial. White exposing evidence of oppression and violence art is ‘nowhere’. Without a history of white art in/by institutions. The women of the Unbound We know who we are without the splice and there may be more attention paid to the local. collective projected poems onto the back of split of formalised English patterns. We pass on Is art representation or fantasy? What are the the South Australian Museum and Armoury our expressions. keywords of white art? building, once an epi-centre of physical anthropology. Intersectionality cannot help all of us express When I was living in the gallery I was aware of our storied realities. IntersectionalITY is like the double presence of non-Indigenous art and We step in, we step out. Mum explains. We go to AboriginalITY is like IndigenITY is like IdentITY. non-Indigenous people. We are often haunted the museum for the first time to see our faces. Ity is like CITY. Let’s move past these ITY words. by our invaders and what they have left behind. They are not big enough to hold us. Without white art there would be no doubling. After my residency I became obsessed with reports of institutions working to decolonise Blak architecture outlines this place and always Without propaganda masquerading as art themselves. I found most claims to be untrue. has. In our apocalyptic fantasies the world would they each have been forced to imagine The use of decolonising is an addiction. The doesn’t end. Colonisation does. Capitalism their own image of us, and would it be less solution is not in the word. does. Our world fights back. The towers of convenient? Naarm crumble – all metal melts. The gum is Harkin speaks about finding in the archives: ‘a great for the roots of the trees, the plants and Would colonial ideas of gender be as pervasive? grand narrative of the Aboriginal problem’. Our they survive… they thrive. How would we perceive and see ourselves? And people are still being problematised for the how would this change the story of women? settler-invader’s benefit and ease. Paola Balla without white art says it is the oppressor that must change, not If you didn’t have your books and art what the oppressed, in her criticisms of the idea of I begin thinking about what would be without would your feminism be? Aboriginal ‘resilience’. We ask buildings to speak white art and writing. If no art had been created painful truths and end eras of easy lies. in the almost 250 years of invasion what would with us be in its absence? These blak women artists I love make art with We go to the museum for the first time to see cultural responsibility against shameful settler- If white art started today, centralised in the cities our faces. I am fourteen. The photographer is invader acts. Recentring and responding. Our of now, would there still be a need to colonise our friend, a Murri like us. Mum works with her mothers, grandmothers, sisters and aunts have the landscape through art? Does this colony in the institution I will eventually work in too made what we are continuing. It is our space, always insert bush poetry until there is no bush? at Kurilpa (place of the water rat). Site-specific our place, our tools, our expertise, our life, and In the absence of white representation would artwork by Fiona Foley and Megan Cope here. it is always with us. white artists appropriate blak ways of working? I am grateful for my ‘exposure’ to art by South East Queensland Indigenous women.

92 93 Hannah Brontë Umma’s tongue – molten at 6000° 2017 (stills) video 3:53 mins 94 Courtesy the artist 95 Sandra Hill Home-maker #9: The hairdresser 2014 oil on linen 76.0 x 91.0 cm Courtesy the artist and Mossenson 96 Galleries, Perth 97 Claudia Nicholson NEW WORLD ORDER 2016 (stills) video 2:30 mins loop Originally commissioned by Runway Experimental Art as a five-channel video 98 Courtesy the artist 99 GENDER EQUITY AND THE Fightback is a course of three units, each ‘However, the facts show that…’ numbers of students who have experienced containing 5–10 lessons. Classes might sexual assault and harassment whilst studying CLASSROOM: deconstruct sexist cartoons, analyse statistics It’s not a stretch to note that FEMCO are at Australian universities. If we consider THE FITZROY HIGH SCHOOL of gender wage gaps, talk about non-gendered trending. The group’s resonance is obvious from how cultures develop within institutions and clothing or consider female representation in the scale of media coverage they’ve attracted, workplaces, and how we can best shift toxic FEMINIST COLLECTIVE sport: and speaks to society’s appetite for change. cultures of entitlement and misogyny from Federal Member for Melbourne, Adam Bandt, consolidating, then we identify the importance Nat Thomas ‘If I were an elite sportsperson I would be congratulated the group in parliament for their of early education as a necessary response. depicted as fierce and competitive.’ Discuss. work, assuring us that FEMCO has the support Feminist theory subjects are more commonly Sometimes the most resonant ideas are so of their community. introduced at university and are not compulsory, simple that you can’t believe nobody thought of Students consider the patterns of objectification and maybe by then it’s too little, too late. The them earlier. The work of the Fitzroy High School used within the advertising and entertainment Education is a highly politicised and contested Fightback teaching resource developed by Feminist Collective (FEMCO) is a game-changing industries: space. All parents and guardians want to FEMCO addresses the link between gender and initiative in the ongoing fight toward gender provide their children with an education that will inequality, and violence against women, and equality in Australia today. Education is always ‘There is a social pressure for me to watch be a foundation on which they may lead happy, introduces it to high school students. a key response to systemic inequality. The what I eat’; meaningful lives. A scan of recent media reveals collective is a pathway towards a future where the extent of societal concern over the equity The lessons we learn when young set firmest, ‘The attractiveness of my body is often fairness, equal opportunity and egalitarianism of educational outcomes. What is important to and they’re the lessons that are often the most referred to in the lyrics of the music that might better materialise. teach young people? With regards to gender difficult to ‘unlearn’. A strong case can be myself and my peer group listen to’; equity the more important question might be made for the mandatory studying of feminism FEMCO began humbly in 2013 as a lunchtime ‘People see my clothing as a statement ‘what is it important not to teach young people?’ in all high schools. The importance of the discussion group led by classroom teacher about my attitude towards sexual activity’; work of FEMCO in addressing the need to feel Bryony O’Keefe in response to a heated debate ‘In video games I often see myself depicted Fighting school sexism: Feminist theory hits empowered and the importance of developing about female characters written by male writers. as strong rather than sexy’. classrooms and maintaining healthy relationships for Since then FEMCO’s progress has been prolific wellbeing throughout life cannot be over stated. Should Australian schools force girls to wear – they have willed themselves into existence as As the students say themselves ‘we are making Marriage and marriage equality are also skirts? an elective subject at the school and have written discussed: the world a better place for young people.’ an Australian Schools Curriculum course called Schools are a microcosm of society – the quest to close Australia’s educational gap Fightback so that other schools can start up ‘If I were able to access the institution We thank the Fitzroy High School Feminist 1 their own feminist collectives. The curriculum of marriage, it would not be unusual for Wellness Centres and rowing tanks: private Collective for their tireless work in introducing addresses gender inequality, the objectification someone close to me to ‘give me away’. schools are rubbing our noses in it feminism to classrooms and for reminding us of young women’s bodies and the use of that gender equity is not just an achievable How Cory Bernardi’s Attempt to smear Wear sexist language within society, to educate and Students consider why books written by goal, it is a basic human right we must all fight a Dress Day ended in windfall encourage teenagers to think about these issues. white middle age men still dominate their toward. reading lists or analyse ‘hairy armpit feminazi’ The Australian criticises The Resilience, ‘We’re having a positive impact on the stereotypes as depicted within mainstream Rights and Respectful Relationships learning 1 http://fhsfemco.com/portfolio-type/resources/ lives of young women. Because who and social media. Another class introduces materials – ‘amounts to brainwashing of better to design a feminist teaching students to intersectional feminism, the children and tax-payer funded indoctrination’ resource for teenagers than feminist juncture of gender and race. In a lesson on teenagers?’ Brighton Grammar Boys Rate Schoolgirl privilege students think about social equality, Sluts on Vile Instagram Account particularly with regards to race, gender, age, ‘Just by existing we’ve started up a sexual orientation, disability and social class. How to improve school results – not extra conversation and got young people talking Students conclude that maths but music, loads of it about feminism. We believe that the Single-sex classes make a difference to girls: founding of our collective, the way we’ve ‘having more opportunity given to you, research. worked with our teachers as equals and despite not choosing that opportunity, is the opportunities we’ve taken to speak what privilege looks like’. The link between a university education and about gender inequality make what we’re securing well-paid work is established. Most doing an excellent example of best practice Students frequently complete a ‘Perception adults would advise teenagers to aim to student voice, student lead action and Revisor’ to challenge their own assumptions: secure a university place. But a recent report student participation, aiming and making by the Australian Human Rights Commission the world a better place for young people.’ ‘I always thought that…’ survey gave a damning indictment of the large http://fhsfemco.com

100 101 Nat Thomas Man cleaning up 2017 durational performance 102 Courtesy the artist 103 Ruth O’Leary Ruth O’Leary Fuck dress Mama 2017 Fuck dress cop car 2016 digital c-type print digital c-type print 150.0 x 100.0 cm 150.0 x 100.0 cm 104 Courtesy the artist Courtesy the artist 105 Giselle Stanborough Giselle dates 2016–17 interactive performance and site-specific multimedia installation dimensions and duration variable 106 Courtesy the artist 107 Tai Snaith A world of her own 2017 recorded audio conversations for podcast durations variable 108 Courtesy the artist 109 ON ART, THE PREDATOR, Her innocuous question about garden a pat on the bum?!’ And my father, never one first time, I stood under the image of a naked gnomes led to a vulgar comment from of such men yet ever obliged by his job to be female angel as an art historian sighed to his AND THE GRAVEYARD Burke about the size of his ‘cock’. Her third around them, seizing his only daughter’s arm, group tour ‘Ah! And her breasts touch the sky!’ OF MODERN CELEBRITY encounter with Burke, an interview at his squeezing it, as if to transmute into the flesh Kenthurst home, was her last. of the girl child’s arm the strength of his male Is it changing? Has the wrecked, raped GARDENING immunity. Renaissance genius Artemisia Gentileschi found When Burke said he had bought a horse for her overdue vengeance in the post-Weinstein Van Badham a young relative ‘because I love watching Dad, I wish it had worked. I wish your own internet hashtag #metoo? Has the awareness her rub her cunt on its back’, the reporter resistance was enough. Normalised by the that, yes, the image creates reality, and the snapped the tape off.1 name-forgotten bum-patter, the alleged Don image of woman, objectified, has created Burke, the alleged Harvey Weinstein and a objects of us finally met its opposition? In Good morning, Australia – and welcome to vast infrastructure of explicit, repeated culture Britain, the new advertising standard is one the horses and gnomes of your new reality. communications received since the day of that bans gender stereotypes. A campaign to An internet wag has quipped ‘2016: your my birth as a girl – god help me – were male put a female face on a banknote was finally favourite celebrities are dead. 2017: the ones behaviours of objectification, intrusion and won, the visual assault of tits and bits on the left alive are sex pests’. In the wake of the violence whose violations I did not escape. covers of ‘lads’ mags sequestered away from its gross allegations about film producer Harvey The unprovoked comments. The unwanted supermarkets. While Australia, too, processes its Weinstein, accusations of male predation, touching. The assaulting kisses, the rough traditions of sexism in the sudden graveyard of harassment, rape and sleaziness have oozed knuckles at my pants, the entrapment in a hotel celebrity gardening, what new judgments will out of Hollywood, and Britain, and the effluent room, a young woman cornered by a powerful we make of our media world, our entertainment, was always going to drift its way towards man, taking the form of a spider. Worse. Far or art? What will our responses be? Australia. The man accused of buying horses worse. And if Dad had’ve known, he would for girls, aroused by the imagined friction have destroyed any of them. Andy Warhol was right when he said ‘we spend of animal and genital, is no less than Don much of our lives seeing without observing’. Burke, the genial, smiling host of former local But I never told him. Most women have not All I know is the week of the Weinstein television lifestyle behemoth, Burke’s Backyard. been so inclined to share the details of their revelations, I found myself in the National It was a gardening show in the 1990s – a humiliations. Again, in the ear, the word Gallery of Australia, staring at the photo-realist ‘ratings winner’ until its cancellation in 2004 ‘normalised’. Normalised by the bouncing sculptural triptych of naked and splayed Elyse – with a catchy theme song, and it offered an breasts of the saucy girls British comedian Poppers, Paul McCarthy’s That Girl (T.G. Awake) idealised vision of relaxed suburban paradise Benny Hill pursued in prime time, family TV 2012–13. And, suddenly, it didn’t strike me as a accessible to any who heeded Burke’s advice entertainment. Normalised by the swimsuit work of art, but an act of predation. regarding the best-practice method to strap sections of Trump-sponsored beauty pageants, 1 Kate McClymont, ‘‘‘A high-grade, twisted abuser”: Don Burke tomatoes, or purchase the correct breed of dog. old men appointed examiners of every limb. a sexual harasser and bully, claims series of women’, Sydney Normalised by a sex-sells advertising standard Morning Herald, 27 November, 2017, accessed at http://www. smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/a-highgrade-twisted- As I write this, it’s less than twenty-four hours that draped the bodies of females over cars, abuser-don-burke-a-sexual-harasser-and-bully-claims-series-of- since the Burke story broke, and yet it says created ‘promo-model’ as a vocation, that women-20171126-gzt6d2.html everything about this year, 2017, that already posed women in bikinis over billboards at the popular response to the revelations appears intersections. to be, at most, a sad, revolted acceptance. Conservative commentator Miranda Devine And normalised by high art, too – women’s has already performed her excuses for Burke bodies are the territories seized by kings of on morning television, much in the way exotic creative empires, the instruments of great male dancers in bars flatter their customers. There are geniuses. Yves Klein reducing paint-smeared certain audiences that need to feel comfortable young women to ‘living brushes’. Dali’s young about their old habits and behaviours, after woman, sodomised ‘by the horns of her own all. Australian actor Sacha Horler reminded us chastity’ in one of his most famous paintings. all recently that the scandal here is not that ‘Women are machines for suffering’, the sixty- powerful men objectify and exploit women, but one year old Pablo Picasso told Françoise Gilot, that the objectification is normalised. the twenty-one year old student he had taken as a mistress. These are not the statements of I recall a work colleague of my father’s, back individuals, but a profession that created the in the 1980s, taking umbrage at ‘the bloody original production line for the commercial women’s libbers’, blurting ‘What’s wrong with assembly of nudes. At the Louvre in Paris for the

110 111 Sophie Takách Evert Manifold 95cc 2017 bronze 5.0 x 4.5 x 12.0 cm 112 Courtesy the artist 113 Hannah Raisin Fold 2015 (still) video 2:55 mins 114 Courtesy the artist and MARS Gallery, Melbourne 115 Lyndal Walker Lyndal Walker Me photographing Francis behind the Me photographing Carl-Henrik easel 2015 (detail) reclining on the bed 2015 (detail) archival pigment print on framed archival pigment print on framed mirror mirror 65.0 x 65.0 cm 65.0 x 65.0 cm 116 Courtesy the artist Courtesy the artist 117 Clare Rae Untitled actions for ACCA #2 2017 archival pigment print, framed 30.0 x 40.0 cm 118 Courtesy the artist 119 Elizabeth Pulie Elizabeth Pulie #60 (Thesis II) 2015 #63 (Sampler for fear and paranoia) 2016 jute, wool, modelling clay, bamboo acrylic, mixed fibre, hessian, cane 256.0 x 143.5 cm 220.0 x 100.0 cm Courtesy the artist and Sarah Cottier Courtesy the artist and Sarah Cottier 120 Gallery, Sydney Gallery, Sydney 121 FEMINISM AND ART: Unfinished Business, the title of ACCA’s FEST included over fifty exhibitions and a two- exhibition, is also the title of an essay day symposium, Feminism, Art & Activism: 40 NOT DONE YET by Anna Goldsworthy which centres on Years.6 Julia Gillard’s ‘misogyny speech’, described Jude Adams by the author as resonating with women’s A motivating factor for FRAN FEST was to mark experience and affirming the ongoing relevance forty years since The Women’s Show (1977), of feminism.1 According to Goldsworthy ‘we an Australia-wide, open-selection exhibition are not done with feminism yet’.2 Feminism’s associated with second-wave feminism and the ‘unfinished business’ is to achieve equality and Adelaide Women’s Art Movement (WAM). to change our present culture, which shames, blames and objectifies women. •

Neither is the art world ‘done with feminism, Margaret Dodd’s funky ceramic teapot with a yet’, for although the current situation for women woman’s face and hair rollers and filled with in the arts has improved greatly since the aspirins, a painting of a child bound to her high days of second-wave feminism, inequality still chair by Loene Furler, Ann Newmarch’s artfully remains. While parity may now exist at the entry arranged kitchen shelf from her series Three level of an art career, the gender gap becomes Months of Interrupted Work 1977, a photograph apparent as women’s careers progress. Female of women workers by Helen Grace, Erica representation in group exhibitions has stalled McGilchrist’s wall-hanging of doilys, Micky at approximately 35% and the gender divide Allan’s hand-coloured photos of babies, Frances widens when it comes to major solo exhibitions, (Budden) Phoenix’s textile collage of religious permanent collections, monographs, art histories iconography and sanitary products. These iconic and the art market. After many decades of works exhibited in The Women’s Show also feminist activism the status quo remains, with featured in FRAN FEST. the majority of successful artists male and the majority of art students female.3 With their domestic subject matter, references to the female body and subjectivity, traditional Moreover, it is only recently that second- domestic crafts and deployment of hand- wave feminist art has gained recognition in coloured photographs, these works establish redefining contemporary art.4 Once designated a feminist genealogy that can be traced from and marginalised as ‘women’s work’, personal- their first iteration to genres and practices political subject matter, collaborative and today. Many contemporary works in FRAN relational processes; and alternative media such FEST exhibitions such as Deborah Prior’s patch- as fabric, textiles and domestic crafts have now work woollen blanket spelling ‘No’, Makeda entered the visual arts mainstream, expanding Duong’s textile investigations of the female the notion of what constitutes art; and no longer reproductive system, Zoe Freney’s painting identified as gender-specific practices. of a child’s toys obscuring the mother-artist, Ursula Halpin’s delicate, glass crochet patterns The recent FRAN FEST in Adelaide referred and Brigid Noone’s exploration of love and back to the 1977 Women’s Show, also in feminism, implicitly acknowledge a matrilineal Adelaide, and these two events, separated by connection to the innovative practices of 40 years, usefully identified trans-generational second-wave feminist art. similarities, consistencies and legacies as well as generational shifts and changes, and FRAN FEST’s inclusion of history-based the ‘unfinished business’ of feminism in the exhibitions such as Photography Meets Australian art world of today. Feminism, the archival project Women’s Show Women and From Here to There,7 The FRAN FEST was a South Australian-based, which spans a four-decade career by each of month long, multi-venue event highlighting the five artists, also imply continuity rather the work of women (including trans-women than a distinct break with the past. As large, and non-binary identities).5 An initiative of the inclusive, feminist events, FRAN FEST and The Feminist Renewal Art Network (FRAN), FRAN Women’s Show had practices in common as

122 123 well as shared characteristics. Both events were To Become Two (2014–16) and It was about histories in view and not subject to cycles of 1 Anna Goldsworthy, ‘Unfinished Business: Sex, Freedom and Misogyny’, Quarterly Essay, no.50, Black Inc., 2013, pp. 1–69. collectively organised, ambitious in scope and opening the very notion that there was a forgetting and remembering but thickened with included satellite activities such as artist talks, particular perspective 2015–17. other voices and perspectives. 2 Anna Goldsworthy ‘Unfinished Business: Sex, Freedom and Misogyny’, p68. workshops, symposia and conferences. While conditions and support for women artists Major exhibitions and events like Unfinished 3 CoUNTess Blog http://countesses.blogspot.nl/search?updated- min=2012-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2013-01- • has improved, some issues remain, such as as Business and FRAN FEST provide models 01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=6 https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/may/24/ the vexed problem of reconciling motherhood for keeping women’s art in view; finding new london-art-audit-female-artists-represented Notwithstanding these cross-generational with an art career, a topic introduced at the FRAN ways of layering feminist art histories in a 4 Holland Cotter, ‘The Art of Feminism as It First Took Shape’, connections, there are marked changes from FEST talk, Fight for Self. Almost forty years ago a trans-generational exchange that counteracts The New York Times, 9 March 2007. http://www.nytimes. the 1970s to today. Forty years ago exhibitions print by Pam Harris for The Lovely Motherhood curatorial neglect of earlier works and affirms com/2007/03/09/arts/design/09wack.html by women artists were the exception rather Show included the following statement: ‘Women the relevance of new feminist art practices. 5 Trans and gender-diversity are important issues for feminism than the norm. In comparison, all galleries need time to feel, think & breathe separate and reinvigorating debates around sex, gender and identity. FRAN FEST ran from 25 Aug–24 Sept 2017. approached by the FRAN FEST collective from their children. They need time to know Finally, referring to arts feminism of the past demonstrated a keenness to participate and themselves as creative individuals . . . distinct four decades in terms of ‘waves’ is problematic, 6 Feminism, Art & Activism: 40 Years was held at the Art Gallery of South Australia in conjunction with the Australian Institute of exhibit work by women artists, many of from their work as mothers’.8 not least because it glosses over complexity Art History, 16–17 September 2017. whom they represented, in itself a significant and contradiction; however as shorthand for 7 Photography Meets Feminism, Flinders University City improvement. The FRAN FEST symposium The same sentiment is echoed in the literature the period in question it remains useful, bearing Gallery, 5 September – 19 November 2017; Women’s Show Women (Remembering The Women’s Show), Archive focused on topics that exemplified the accompanying the FRAN FEST talk, ‘Art in mind that there are always competing Hub, ACE: Open, 26 August – 16 September 2017; and interactive and inclusive nature of twenty demands what a mother’s life doesn’t easily tendencies and discourses. From Here to There, SASA Gallery, University of South Australia, 1 – 22 September 2017. first century feminism including the role of permit: a concentration of self, the autonomy to archives as a site of activism, care and make use of the artistic impulse when it arrives, My own path corresponds to this trajectory 8 Pam Harris, Women Need Time to feel, think and breathe, separate from their children 1981, silkscreen print. reciprocity; identity in the age of social and the momentum of pursuing that idea of waves. In the 1970s I was involved with media, indigenous art and intersectional without the constant threat of interruption’.9 feminist activist groups associated with 9 Rachel Power, Motherhood & Creativity: the divided heart, Affirm Press, Melbourne, 2015. feminism. Challenging the notion of discrete Fight for Self demonstrated that the problem Women’s Liberation and with the Women’s Art practices, art history and studio practice came of negotiating an art career, paid work, family Movements in Sydney and Adelaide. From the 10 CoUNTess http://countesses.blogspot.com.au/2009/06/ together with a surprising number of art responsibilities, career gaps and subsequent mid-80s I was ensconced in academia teaching 11 Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’ [1979], in Toril Moi, Kristeva Reader, Columbia University Press, New York, 1986, pp. 188–213. school graduates taking on the work of loss of identity are very real concerns for a range of programs including women, art historians, either in terms of performative today’s mother-artists and are indicative of why and gender courses, at a time which coincided 12 See http://countesses.blogspot.com.au/ and http://thecountessreport.com.au/ re-enactments or in locating their own women’s careers might taper off mid-career.10 with the burgeoning of postmodern theories. practices. The FRAN FEST Poster Project was (Perhaps we should insist on alternative career Theories of gender and difference have much also a platform for expressing contemporary paths that take into account what Julia Kristeva to offer the analyses of women’s art so side- concerns and is included in Unfinished called ‘women’s time’).11 lining academic feminism by the easy reliance Business along with other poster works and on wave-ist views of what’s current and what’s collectives from the 1970s to the present. According to Goldsworthy changing the culture is not should be discouraged. In the second Feminist posters can be bold, brash and feminism’s unfinished business. How far are we decade of the twenty-first century, I find myself text-based or nuanced and pictorial, as with along in changing the culture of the visual arts? again working in small, independent groups, Ann Newmarch’s silkscreen print We Must my archival interest in the 1970s coinciding with Risk Unlearning 1975, which invokes the The legacy of more than four decades of cross-generational practices fruitfully mining entanglement of lived femininity, advertising feminist activism is having brought women’s this period of feminist art and looking forward and consumerism. Historically, posters have art to the attention of galleries, museums and to ongoing feminist art initiatives. also presented a countervailing view to educational institutions. Even so, we should feminism as white, middle-class and privileged, heed the example set by the CoUNTess blog ... Seems, I’m not done with feminism, yet! by addressing issues of race, ethnicity, class and report in recognising the importance of and sexual identity. Thus, they offer a unique data collection.12 In the period since the 1970s approach to mapping the different stages, we’ve seen a shift away from equal opportunity histories and ideologies of feminism. Similarly, feminism but as a FRAN FEST discussion community arts projects such as Vivienne revealed, institutions do take notice of call-outs Binns’ Mothers’ memories, other’s memories against inequality and sexism, thus effecting 1980 complicated identity by foregrounding change. As well as expanding the concept cultural and ethnic diversity and anticipated of art, 70s feminism introduced innovative later relational and participatory projects approaches to the discipline of art history, such as Kelly Doley’s The Learning Centre: interrogating its limits and exclusions. We Two Feminists 2012 and Alex Martinis Roe’s need to continue this work, keeping feminist

124 125 Ann Newmarch Ann Newmarch We must risk unlearning 1975 Women hold up half the sky 1978 screenprint screenprint 80.0 x 65.0 cm 91.5 x 65.0 cm Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, 126 University of Western Australia University of Western Australia 155127 Kate Daw Kate Daw Purple flower (Clontarf Street) 2015 Pol (mothers bedroom) 2016 oil paint on linen on board oil paint on gesso sottile 30.0 x 30.0 cm 30.0 x 30.0 cm Courtesy the artist and Sarah Scout Courtesy the artist and Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne Presents, Melbourne 128 Photograph: Tobias Titz Photograph: Tobias Titz 129 Mikala Dwyer A weight of maybes 2017 (detail) aluminium, fabric, fittings, wire, goop, plastic, acrylic paint dimensions variable 130 Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney 131 LEVEL Right now! 2017 mixed media 130.0 x 100.0 x 40.0 cm 132 Courtesy the artists 133 FILM PROGRAM SELECTED BY Megan McMurchy, HELEN GRACE Margot Nash, Margot Oliver and Jeni Gillian Armstrong Thornley (directors) (director) For love or money: A The roof needs mowing history of women and work 1971 in Australia 1983 16mm film (transferred to 1” film (transferred to digital file) digital file) 7:51 mins 107:00 mins Courtesy Gillian Armstrong Courtesy Ronin Films and HLA Management, Sydney SELECTED BY JACQUELINE Megan McMurchy MILLNER, JANE (director) SCHNEIDER AND Apartments 1977 DEBORAH SZAPIRO 16mm film (transferred to (FEMFLIX) digital file) 10:00 mins Tracey Moffatt Moodeitj Yorgas 1988 Essie Coffey (director) video 22:00 mins Essie Coffey, Alec Morgan, Courtesy the artist, Femflix Martha Ansara (producers) and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney My survival as an Aboriginal 1978 16mm film (transferred to digital file) Emma-Kate Croghan 50:00 mins Sexy girls, sexy appliances Courtesy of the National 1992 Sound and Film Archive of 16mm (transferred to digital Australia, Canberra file) Distribution of DVDs 3:00 mins available from www. Courtesy the artist, Femflix balladfilms.com and the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne Art Theory Productions, Sydney Jackie Wolf aka Jackie College of the Arts Farkas If looks could kill 1983 Amelia Rose Towers 1992 Super 8 (transferred to 16mm blown up to 35mm digital file) film (transferred to digital 12.14 mins file) Courtesy Helen Grace 11:00 mins Produced as part of the Courtesy the artist, course Women and Art, Femflix and Australian taught by Helen Grace Film Television and Radio at Sydney College of the School, Sydney Arts in 1983. Collaborating students: Sue Callanan, Ingrid Cullen, Ruby Davies, Monica Pellizzari Sue Doust, Anne Ferran, Beth Gibbins, Pam Ledden, Just desserts 1993 Kate Millington, Jenny 35mm film (transferred to O’Brien, Jane Parkes, Jenny digital file) Pitty, John Simpson, with 13:00 mins extras, Eliza Campbell and Courtesy the artist and Judith Lodwick Femflix

Art Theory Productions, Sydney College of the Arts If looks could kill 1983 Super 8 12.14 mins 134 Courtesy Helen Grace 135 Samantha Lang Nat and Ali Deborah Kelly Out 1995 The face of Nat and Ali 2000 Beastliness 2 011 16mm (transferred to digital Super 8 to Beta to VHS digital animation made file) (transferred to digital file) from paper collages 11:00 mins 3:15 mins 4:32 mins Courtesy the artist and Animation: Chris Wilson Femflix and Christian Heirich Hayley Arjona Original score: The Brutal Poodles. Sarah Watt He look like she don’t know Audio engineering: Steve better 2001 Smart Small treasures 1995 Super 8 to Beta to VHS Courtesy the artist 16mm film (transferred to (transferred to digital file) digital file) 3:40 mins 14:00 mins Megan Cope Courtesy Femflix and the Estate of the artist Sue Dodd The Blaktism 2014 video Gossippop Now 2005 8:04 mins Super 8 to Beta tape SELECTED BY KYM Courtesy the artist, THIS IS (transferred to digital file) NO FANTASY and Dianne MAXWELL 10:54 mins Tanzer Gallery, Melbourne Courtesy the artist and Anna Barbara Campbell Pappas Gallery, Melbourne Soda Jerk Flesh glories 1997 Destiny Deacon video 8 (transferred to Undaddy mainframe 2014 digital file) and Virginia Fraser digital video 7:02 mins Forced into images 2005 materials: A Cyberfeminist Courtesy the artist and Super 8 film, finished on Manifesto for the 21st Australian Video Art video and DVD (transferred Century (1991); HD Green Archive, Monash University, to digital file) Screen Hand Gesture for Melbourne 1:10 mins iPad Animation (2013), Kids Courtesy the artists and Guide to the Internet (1997); Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Komputer Tutor: Komputer Tracey Moffatt Sydney Kindergarten (1993); The Exorcist (1973) and online Heaven 1997 images SPbeta (transferred to 1:19 mins digital file) SELECTED BY Courtesy the artists 28:00 mins LAURA CASTAGNINI Courtesy Ronin Films The Kingpins SELECTED BY La La Hi Prism Rhapsody happens 2005 THE UNFINISHED (Kym Maxwell, digital video Videographer: Gotaro BUSINESS producer) Uematsu CURATORIUM 2000 Winter Collection – Additional vocals: Jameson Stylee 2000 King Helen Grace VHS video compilation Sound design: Dylan Martin Courtesy Kym Maxwell and T-shirt design: Richard Bell Romance 2015 the artists Courtesy the artists HD video 7:20 mins Courtesy the artist Patricia Piccinini Barbara Cleveland Breathing room 1999 Runaway 2008 mp4 (transferred to digital HD video file) 5:56 mins 1:45 mins Courtesy the artists

Jacinta Schreuder Smart girl action 1998 video 8 to BETA to VHS (transferred to digital file) 1:30 mins

Helen Grace Romance 2015 HD video 7:20 mins 136 Courtesy the artist 137 Frances Barrett Lyndal Jones PERFORMANCE PROGRAM Born 1983, Sydney Born 1949, Sydney Lives and works in Lives and works in Melbourne Melbourne and Avoca

New performance Prediction Piece #7 1984 commission 2017 performance lecture Courtesy the artist first presented as part of Australia: Nine Contemporary Artists, Barbara Campbell Culver City Masonic Temple, 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Born 1961, Beaudesert, Arts Festival, Los Angeles Queensland Courtesy the artist Lives and works in Sydney

Cloche 1999 Técha Noble

performance, with an object Born 1977, Melbourne by Paul Saint Lives and works in Sydney first performed at the and Berlin Department of Performance

Studies, Sydney University, Dear Diane 2017 Sydney, 1999 performance Courtesy the artist Courtesy the artist

Hannah Donnelly Linda Sproul Born 1989, Inverell, Born 1958, Brisbane New South Wales Lives and works in Wiradjuri Melbourne Lives and works in

Melbourne Changing nature 1994 performance New performance first presented as part of commission 2017 Heart Pumping Blood, a Courtesy the artist performance program coinciding with the exhibition Knowing Embittered Swish the Sensorium and (Romy Fox, Mick Klepner accompanying conference Roe, Mossy 333, Bobuq Performing Sexualities, Sayed, Ainslie Templeton) Institute of Modern Art, formed 2016, Melbourne Brisbane, 1994 Live and work in Melbourne Courtesy the artist and Sydney

Fluid Bonding 2017 Further performances will performance be announced over the Costume design: Debris course of the exhibition. For Facility details, see acca.melbourne Courtesy the artists and Next Wave, Melbourne

Lyndal Jones Prediction Piece #7 1984 performance lecture first presented as part of Australia: Nine Contemporary Artists, Culver City Masonic Temple, Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival, Los Angeles 138 Courtesy the artist 139 LIST OF WORKS Another Planet Cigdem Aydemir Janet Burchill and Sadie Chandler Posters Inc. [print Jennifer McCamley Born 1983, Sydney Born 1963, Melbourne workshop] Lives and works in Sydney Janet Burchill Born 1955, Lives and works in Melbourne Melbourne Melbourne, active Extremist activity (Ride) 1984–1992 Jennifer McCamley Born 2 011 1957, Brisbane The weight of images 2017 video, stereo sound Carole Wilson Live and work in ink on paper, paste 9:04 mins Melbourne 1120.0 x 420.0 cm State girl’s school 1988 Courtesy the artist and Extremist activity (Stroll) screenprint, oil based Aesthetic suicide 2013 Charles Nodrum Gallery, 2 011 inks Silver bullets 1982 (re- Melbourne video, stereo sound 60.5 x 80.5 cm edited 2013) 13:42 mins super 8 film, transferred to Julie Sheils Kate Daw Extremist activity (Swing) digital format, 5:00 mins, A refuge is a safe 2012 Born 1965, Esperance, place n.d. HD video, silent SCUM tapes 68–96 1996 Western Australia screenprint, oil based 2:49 mins (re-edited 2013), SuperVHS Lives and works in inks transferred to digital Melbourne 76.0 x 51.0 cm Courtesy the artist format, 22:00 mins Pol (mothers bedroom) University of Melbourne SCUM tapes 68 – 96 1996 2016 Art Collection Ali Gumillya Baker framed offset poster, 70.0 oil paint on gesso sottile Gift of Dr Carole D. Wilson 30.0 x 30.0 cm Born 1975, Kaurna land, x 50.0 cm

Adelaide Silver bullets 2013 Purple flower (Clontarf Atong Atem Mirning Lives and works in framed digital poster Street) 2015 Born 1991, Addis Ababa, Adelaide 70.0 x 50.0 cm. oil paint on linen on board Ethiopia Collection: Anthony Scott, 30.0 x 30.0 cm Arrived Australia 1997 Racist texts 2014/17 Melbourne Lives and works in stack of books 1975 (daisy) 2016 Melbourne 800.0 cm (height) Aesthetic suicide 2017, oil paint on gesso sottile Courtesy the artist digital poster, 70.0 x 50.0 30.0 x 30.0 cm Barber 2017 cm digital print The blue hour 2016 21.0 x 15.0 cm Vivienne Binns Valerie Solanas, SCUM oil paint on gesso sottile manifesto, [originally 30.0 x 30.0 cm Born 1940, Wyong, New Cattle herder 2017 published 1967], five South Wales digital print editions The blue hour (Guerlaine) Lives and works in 15.0 x 21.0 cm 2016 Canberra glass cube television oil paint on gesso sottile Children’s camp 2017 and silver box 1968/1992, 30.0 x 30.0 cm Repro vag dens 3 1976 digital print designed by Mario Bellini vitreous enamel on steel 15.0 x 21.0 cm for Brionvega, steel and Courtesy the artist and 40.5 x 30.5 cm aluminium stand, steel and Sarah Scout Presents, Courtesy the artist Pounding flour 2017 glass bookcase, chair Melbourne digital print Mothers’ memories Courtesy the artists and 21.0 x 15.0 cm Neon Parc, Melbourne others’ memories 1980 Linda Dement prints, installation, photo- Volcanic mud collectors screenprint, printed in Born 1960, Brisbane Madison Bycroft 2017 colour vitreous enamels, Lives and works in Sydney digital print from multiple stencils; Born 1987, Belair, South Courtesy the artist 15.0 x 21.0 cm prints attached by nylon Australia line to anodised steel Lives and works in Feminist methodology Courtesy the artist metal postcard rack Rotterdam machine 2016 52.0 x 60.0 cm (95 pieces) three-channel video Archie Barry Blacktown City Art All the ills that flesh is heir variable duration Collection, Blacktown Arts to 2017 Courtesy the artist Born 1990, Sydney Centre, Sydney digital video, colour, sound Lives and works in 15:00 mins Melbourne Courtesy the artist Narelle Desmond Hannah Brontë Tatsache 2017 Born 1970, Melbourne video Born 1991, Brisbane Lives and works in 4:24 mins Lives and works in Melbourne Brisbane SLUTbag 2008 Hypnic 2017 Umma’s tongue – molten vinyl, pvc, plastic, card live performance 110.0 x 220.0 cm 4:00 mins (approx.) at 6000° 2017 video Courtesy the artist Courtesy the artist 3:53 mins Courtesy the artist

140 141 Kelly Doley Fiona Foley Beatrice paint, felt-tip Courtesy The Cross Art Nick Waterlow, Gillian Jillposters Kate Just

Wharldall marker, paper ring Projects, Sydney Whiteley, Kevin Wilson, [print workshop] Born 1984, Sydney Born 1964, Maryborough, reinforcements Further information Paul Zika Born 1974, Connecticut A powerful act 2017 Lives and works in Sydney Queensland 100.0 x 70.0 cm available at: crossart. Courtesy the artist, Sutton Arrived Australia 1996 digital print Melbourne, active from Badtjala people, (unfolded) com.au/archive/95-2016- Gallery, Melbourne and Lives and works in 59.5 x 42.0 cm 1993 Things learnt about Wondunna clan, Fraser 25.0 x 35.0 cm (folded exhibitions-projects/291- Milani Gallery, Brisbane Melbourne feminism #1–95 2014 Island as artist book) future-feminist-archive- All works courtesy of Carole Wilson ink on card Lives and works in report Furious 2015 the artist and Fran Fest 95 sheets, each 60.0 x Brisbane futurefeministarchive. Natalie Harkin and Maggie neon text, black paint 52.0 cm Mini Graff 20.0 x 59.0 x 5.0 cm com.au/ Fooke Cruthers Collection of Black velvet 1996 Born 1970, Adelaide City of Port Phillip Women’s Art, University of cotton fabric with cotton Virginia Fraser and Broke 2016 Lives and works in [Children want Collection, Melbourne acrylic screen print Adelaide Western Australia appliqué Elvis Richardson Sarah Goffman attention from all 9 bags: 99.0 x 20.0 cm (three screens) people, not just (with handle, each); Virginia Fraser Born 100.0 x 70.0 cm Born 1966, Sydney Archive fever paradox [2]/ women] 1983 Maria Kozic Mikala Dwyer Melbourne Lives and works in Sydney whitewash-brainwash 2014 screenprint, oil based 180.0 x 200.0 cm (overall Born 1957, Melbourne dimensions variable) Lives and works in video projection with inks Born 1959, Sydney Melbourne Deborah Kelly I am with you 2017 sound 65.0 x 45.5 cm Lives and works in New Lives and works in Sydney Queensland Art Gallery York | Gallery of Modern Art, Elvis Richardson Born La Lucha Continua, cardboard, permanent video loop: Ali Gumillya 1965, Sydney marker Baker, Denys Finney and Carole Wilson A weight of maybes 2017 Brisbane 2016 Bitch 1990 Lives and works in archival pigment ink dimensions variable Daniel Phillis aluminium, fabric, fittings, Melbourne Courtesy the artist sound: Bradley Harkin We are marching for screen-printed billboard wire, goop, plastic, acrylic FRAN FEST [producer] on cotton rag all women exploited represented as Ilfotex 50.0 x 70.0 cm Courtesy the artist paint FRAN FEST Poster Project FEMMO no.s 1-6 2014–15 and raped in war 1983 wallpaper dimensions variable 2017 screen print on cotton Elizabeth Gower screenprint, oil based 500.0 x 1000.0 cm Courtesy the artist and 140.0 x 110.0 cm (6 works, Fiona MacDonald Sandra Hill inks Courtesy the artist Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Born 1952, Adelaide 76.0 x 53.0 cm Deborah Kelly each) Lives and works in Born 1951, Perth Sydney Courtesy the artists Full Flight Out West, and Tina Fiveash 2016 Melbourne Nyoongar LEVEL Hey, Hetero! Get two-colour screen Lives and works in Deej Fabyc married 2001 The Cross Art Portrait of the artist as a Balingup, Western Formed 2010, Brisbane Mary Featherston print, edition 30 digital print Portrait of a ladykiller Live and work in Brisbane Projects, Sydney 40.0 x 57.0 cm. young woman 1974–2017 Australia and Emily Floyd 59.5 x 42.0 cm 1984 Source images: photographs and digital [producer] prints Home-o-genus 2013 screenprint, oil based Right now! 2017 Emily Floyd Born 1974, Vivienne Binns, inks mixed media Melbourne Deborah Kelly Future Feminist Archive Full Flight, 1982–83, dimensions variable mixed media Mary, Mary 2010 59.0 x 44.5 cm 130.0 x 100.0 x 40.0 cm Lives and works in 2016 Archive ArtsOutWest, Photographers: Christine 122.0 x 105.0 cm digital print Courtesy the artists Melbourne print folio Bathurst Abrahams, Howard Arkley, 59.5 x 42.0 cm Mark Ashkanasy, Peter Home-maker #9: The Carole Wilson Mary Featherston Born Alison Alder Bellas, Luba Bilu, Judith hairdresser 2014 Eugenia Lim Susan Bruce Raquel Ormella Blackall, John Brash, oil on linen Strike while the Iron’s 1943, London Dear Honorary Arrived Australia 1952 Queer rights are Pat Brassington, Janine 76.0 x 91.0 hot 1987 Born 1981, Melbourne Secretary, Resolution The Mysterious Lives and works in human rights 2017 Burke, Naomi Cass, screenprint, oil based Lives and works in No 618 Make More Vanessa – CMYK 2016 Melbourne digital print Felicity Colman, Chandler Courtesy the artist and inks Melbourne Work 2016 [a page from ‘Artists 59.5 x 42.0 cm Coventry, Holly Crawford, Mossenson Galleries, 76.0 x 51.0 cm screen print on paper as Cartoonists, or Round table 2017 Andrew Curtis, Max Perth Woman’s work 2017 100.0 x 70.0 cm Extended Black and plywood, MDF, paint, steel, Courtney Delany, Phoebe Dougal, (series) White’] screenprint on paper, Coombs Rosalind Drummond, Catriona Ainslie in the park Louise Kate digital print Harriet Edquist, Bonita Hissy Fit copy of Ripple, no. 11 Human rights are a Timmah in the library 42.5 x 60.0 cm Ely, Brendan Esposito, Holyoake 35.0 x 500.0 x 540.0 cm feminist issue 2017 Anderson Formed 2013, Sydney Tien in the lab Sue Ford, Katrina Fraser, Courtesy the artists and digital print Live and work in Sydney I won’t see you in Judith in the dressing Big Fag Press [printer] Billy Gruner, Pam Anna Schwartz Gallery, 59.5 x 42.0 cm Elvis Richardson paradise!! Slut n.d. room Melbourne Life, Lines and Legacy Gullifer, Sonya Hofer, 19.12.15 2015 screenprint, oil based Mariam in the garden 2016 All the mentioned Jonathan Holmes, Marian digital video inks framed giclee prints on Loene Furler lithographic print Hosking, Henry The lovely women in ten different 60:00 mins 65.0 x 45.5 cm photo rag 100.0 x 70.0 cm Jolis, Rachel Kent, Anne motherhoods 2017 issues of ‘Art and Courtesy the artists 5 diptychs: 119.0 x 84.0 cm Kirker, Sardi Klein, digital print from Australia’ 1992-4 2014 (each panel) Christine Lacata, Paula original photograph Country Women collage on box board Carole Wilson Courtesy the artist Latos-Valier, Norbert 59.5 x 42.0 cm Artists (Northern c.88.0 x 61.0 cm and Lin Tobias With thanks to: Carolyn (sheet), 70.0 x 50.0 Loeffler, Liz McDowell, Ang (typesetting and Rivers Chapter): Vikki McInnes, Allan (image) What can happen to design), United Measures Victoria Paterson Mitelman, Kathy Monaro, Women 2017 Maree Bracker, Jan you n.d. (framing), Colour Factory Hannah Neeson, Ivan digital print Davis, Karla Dickens, colour offset (printing), Ainslie Lynette Riley Neeson, John R. Neeson, 59.5 x 42.0 cm Jenny Kitchener, 42.0 x 29.5 cm Templeton, Timmah Ball, Louise Neri, John Leonie Lane, Shelagh Tien Huynh, Judith Lucy Darkstar Press (printer) Nixon, Esther Pierini, Morgan, Liz Stops University of Melbourne and Mariam Issa, Tom Carrie Cloak for Pearl Kenneth Pleban, Kiffy Country Women Art Collection Ross, Emma McRae, Sarah Gambanyi Gibbs 2016 Rubbo, Kati Rule, David Radzevicius Artists (Northern Gift of Dr Carole D. Wilson Parkes, Ghita Loebenstein, digital print Sequeira, Jason Smith, Prone (Hillary) 2017 Rivers Chapter) 2016 Selina Ou, Quino Holland 100.0 x 70.0 cm Trevor Smith, Irene Sutton, digital print digital print with and Stuart Geddes Paul Taylor, Masato 59.5 x 42.0 cm synthetic polymer Takasaka, Nat Thomas, Tobias Titz, Evelyn Tsitas,

142 143 Lip Collective Spence Messih with Frances (Budden) Elizabeth Pulie Tai Snaith Sophie Takách Me photographing Francis behind the easel 2015 Vincent Silk Phoenix Lip 1976-1984 Born 1967, Sydney Born 1980, Melbourne Born 1979, Cambridge, archival pigment print on Australian feminist arts Vincent Silk Born 1989, Born 1950, Sydney Lives and works in Sydney Lives and works in England framed mirror journal Melbourne Died 2017, Adelaide Melbourne Arrived Australia 1981 65.0 x 65.0 cm no.s 1, 1976; 2/3, 1977; Lives and works in #43 2014 Lives and works in 4, 1978/79; 5, 1980; 6, Melbourne Queen of spades 1975 acrylic, mixed fibre, A world of her own 2017 Melbourne Me photographing Rickard 1981/82; 7, 1982/83; 8, 1984 (previously known as hessian, jute recorded audio reclining in silk 2015 Collections: Lesley Alway, THESE THINGS WE DO/ Kunda 1976) 186.0 x 96.5 cm conversations for podcast Evert Manifold 95cc 2017 archival pigment print on Suzanne Davies, Anne LONG LIVE SNAILS 2017 found doily on cotton, Audio post production by bronze framed mirror Marsh text on paper, steel shelf plastic zipper on canvas #60 (Thesis II) 2015 Bec Fary 5.0 x 4.5 x 12.0 cm 65.0 x 65.0 cm text originally published 50.0 x 42.0 x 3.0 cm jute, wool, modelling clay, Intro song by Phia Courtesy the artist on the occasion of THE Collection of Toni bamboo durations variable Rickard on the end of the Linda Marrinon 256.0 x 143.5 cm available at: acca. LOOK BACK, Spence Robertson, Sydney Salote Tawale bed with me in a skirt 2015 Born 1959, Melbourne Messih, Alaska Projects, 26 melbourne/program/a- archival pigment print on Lives and works in April – 20 May 2017 Relic (Mary’s blood never #63 (Sampler for fear and world-of-her-own/ Born 1976, Fiji Islands framed mirror Melbourne 21.0 x 29.7 cm failed me) 1976–77 paranoia) 2016 Courtesy the artist Lives and works in Sydney 65.0 x 65.0 cm Courtesy the artists collage, embroidery, acrylic, mixed fibre, Sorry! 1982 crochet, lace, paint hessian, cane At the time of publication, Burebasaga maramas 2017 Courtesy the artist synthetic polymer paint on 72.0 x 45.0 cm 220.0 x 100.0 cm interviewees include: video installation canvas Ann Newmarch Collection of the Estate of Maree Clarke, Maude dimensions variable Courtesy the artist and Davey, Tonié Field, Diena Courtesy the artist Shevaun Wright 59.5 x 87.5 x 4.5 cm Born 1945, Adelaide the artist Collection: Museum Sarah Cottier Gallery, Georgetti, Katherine Lives and works in Sydney Hattam, Lou Hubbard, Born 1984, Darwin of Contemporary Art Adelaide No goddesses Lives and works in Sydney Australia, Sydney no mistresses Chaco Kato, Claire Lambe, Nat Thomas Lives of the artists 2002-05 Shelley Lasica, Rachel We must risk unlearning (Anarchofeminism) 1978 Born 1967, Brisbane The rape contract 2016 What I must bear 1982 insert for a ‘Dinner Party’ photocopy on paper, 10 Nolan, Patricia Piccinini, 1975 magazines Sally Smart, Jenny Watson Lives and works in 14 sheets of paper, synthetic polymer paint on screenprint runner: red embroidery Melbourne wooden boxes, UV ink, canvas cotton on white each 29.5 x 21.0 cm 80.0 x 65.0 cm Courtesy the artist torches 172.0 x 203.0 cm commercial doily Giselle Stanborough Hot air 2017 36.0 x 27.0 cm (each frame) Cruthers Collection of Women hold up half the 29.7 x 21.0 cm mirror, hairdryers Courtesy the artist and Women’s Art, University of sky 1978 Collection of the Estate of Clare Rae Born 1986, Waratah, New 87.0 x 107.0 x 50.0 cm MARS Gallery, Melbourne Western Australia screenprint the artist South Wales 91.5 x 65.0 cm Born 1981, Melbourne Lives and works in Sydney Man cleaning up 2017 Portraits of a mardigras Lives and works in performance Alex Martinis Roe Cruthers Collection of (A book in memory of Melbourne Giselle dates 2016–17 duration variable homosexual solidarity in Born 1982, Melbourne Women’s Art, University of interactive performance July 1978, Sydney) 1978 Lives and works in Berlin Western Australia Untitled actions for ACCA and site-specific Courtesy the artist artist’s book, ink, paper 1-6 2017 multimedia installation offset-lithograph, printed It was about opening the archival pigment prints, dimensions and duration in black ink Lyndal Walker very notion that there was Claudia Nicholson framed variable 13.5 x 14.0 cm dimensions variable Courtesy the artist a particular perspective Born 1973, Melbourne Born 1987, Bogotá, Collection of the Estate of Courtesy the artist 2015–17 Lives and works in Berlin Colombia the artist three-channel video Arrived Australia 1987 Desiree Tahiri installation, HD video and Carl-Henrik and I with Lives and works in Sydney Get your abortion laws off Hannah Raisin 16mm film Born 1991, Wollongong painter’s trolley and teal our bodies 1980 33:02 mins (total running Born 1987, Melbourne Lives and works drapery 2015 NEW WORLD ORDER 2016 filet crochet milk-jug time) Lives and works in in Wollongong archival pigment print on video cover, pink beads, carpet Courtesy the artist Melbourne framed mirror 2:30 mins loop fragment mounted on The representation of 65.0 x 65.0 cm Originally commissioned board Fold 2015 women in the current by Runway Experimental 27.0 x 36.0 cm Spence Messih video Australian artworld 2017 Francis on the bed with me Art as a five-channel video Collection of the Estate of 2:55 mins photocopied and in the mirror 2015 Born 1989, Sydney Courtesy the artist the artist assembled collage Archival pigment print on Lives and works in Sydney Courtesy the artist and MARS Gallery, Melbourne including cardboard, tin framed mirror OUR STORY / HERSTORY? foil, paint, fabric, typed 65.0 x 65.0 cm River beneath the river (I Ruth O’Leary Working on…Judy words, and images from & II) 2017 Born 1990, Melbourne Chicago’s ‘Dinner Party’ magazines bound with Frances on the window Cyanotype on watercolour Lives and works in 1982 thread sill with me wearing black paper Melbourne self-published photocopied 10.5 x 14.5 x 1.0cm stockings 2015 56.0 x 76.0 cm and stapled artist’s book, archival pigment print on Collection: Artbank, Fuck dresses 2015–17 white paper, ribbon, The cat lady 2017 framed mirror Sydney acrylic on cotton acetate cover photocopied and 65.0 x 65.0 cm dimensions variable 15.0 x 10.5 cm assembled collage You move (on the other Collection of the Estate of including cat hair, Me photographing Carl- side of) 2017 Fuck dress cop car 2016 the artist handmade paper, charcoal, Henrik reclining on the steel, testosterone gel digital c-type print paint, pen and typed, cut bed 2015 dimensions variable 150.0 x 100.0 cm and pasted words archival pigment print on Courtesy the artist 11.5 x 16.5 x 0.5 cm framed mirror Courtesy the artist 65.0 x 65.0 cm Courtesy the artist

144 145 The exhibition involves over seventy-five artists and we CONTRIBUTORS PROJECT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS would like to especially acknowledge ACCA’s superb installation team – Beau Emmett, Carly Fisher, Nicholas Kleindienst, Patrick O’Brien, Brian Scales, Simone Tops Jude Adams is a former lecturer in art history and theory Curators Unfinished Business: Perspectives on art and feminism and Danae Valenza – who have contributed to all aspects at the University of South Australia and an independent Paola Balla has been developed as a collaborative project and we of the exhibition with unflinching commitment, expertise curator and writer. Max Delany are sincerely grateful to the many artists and writers, and enthusiasm, and we acknowledge the contribution of Julie Ewington colleagues and collaborators, partners and supporters – ACCA’s Exhibition Manager, Samantha Vawdrey, for her Van Badham is a columnist for The Guardian, their Annika Kristensen individuals and organisations – who have contributed to coordination and production of so many facets of this Melbourne arts critic, a writer and theatremaker. Vikki McInnes this ambitious, far-reaching endeavour. project. Elvis Richardson Paola Balla is a Wemba-Wemba and Gunditjmara artist, Firstly, we would like to express our great appreciation ACCA’s Artistic Director would like to acknowledge curator and academic, Victoria University Curatorial Interns to participating artists for their inspiring contributions the outstanding intellectual, curatorial and project Eloise Breskvar and perspectives, and who, along with many additional management contributions of ACCA’s Senior Curator Laura Castagnini is Assistant Curator of Modern and Brigid Hansen artists, welcomed us into their studios and living rooms, Annika Kristensen, and – with Annika – we thank all of Contemporary British Art at Tate. Her research interests and were especially generous in their offer of wise counsel the staff at ACCA who have embraced the project with include feminist practices as well as modern and Exhibition Manager and insights. We very much appreciate their enthusiastic imagination and commitment, which has made the project contemporary British artists of African and Asian descent. Samantha Vawdrey response to the idea of the exhibition and support of an inspiring process for us all. the project through the production and loan of new and Max Delany is Artistic Director and CEO, Australian Centre Installation team existing works. We would like to especially acknowledge the exhibition for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Beau Emmett partners, donors and supporters who have provided Carly Fisher It has been a true pleasure and honour to work with such significant support for the development of the exhibition, Linda Dement is an artist based in Sydney. Nicholas Kleindienst a wonderful team of collaborating curators, to whom publication and public programs, and in serving as Patrick O’Brien we express our profound thanks. As curators, artists, ambassadors for the project and sharing expertise and Julie Ewington is an independent curator, writer and Brian Scales writers and academics, the curatorial team embody an networks. And finally, special thanks to Julie Ewington, broadcaster living in Sydney. Previously she was Simone Tops inspiring depth of inter-generational experience and for her opening remarks on the occasion of the official Head of Australian Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery Danae Valenza cultural perspective. The dialogues that have informed our opening. of Modern Art. process have led to a richer exhibition than might have Design been conceived independently – the experience of working To all of the above we offer heartfelt thanks. Annika Kristensen is Senior Curator, Australian Centre for Matt Hinkley together, and the generous and passionate commitment Contemporary Art, Melbourne. that each member of the team has shown, will have an — MD & AK Print enduring influence. We have also enjoyed and appreciated Vikki McInnes is managing editor of Art + Australia at the Adams Print the contributions of Eloise Breskvar and Brigid Hansen, Victorian College of the Arts (University of Melbourne) and Curatorial Interns on the project, who have worked on co-director of Sarah Scout Presents. research and curatorial assistance with great enthusiasm, flair and commitment. Ellen van Neerven is a Mununjali person from the Yugambeh language group of South East Queensland, and We are grateful to the authors who have contributed the author of Heat and Light (University of Queensland stimulating texts to this catalogue, which bring together Press, 2014) and Comfort Food (University of Queensland engaging and perceptive standpoints on the relations of Press, 2016). art and feminism. We are equally appreciative of generous loans from public and private collections, along with the Elvis Richardson is an artist and founding editor of support of participating artists and their representative CoUNTess. galleries.

Nat Thomas is an artist and writer based in Melbourne. Unfinished Business includes a dedicated program of films from the 1970s to the present, and we are especially grateful to the guest curators of this program – Helen Grace, Femflix (Dr Jaqueline Millner, Jane Schneider and Deborah Szapiro), Kym Maxwell and Laura Castagnini – for their contribution to the program and contact with participating film-makers and artists. We also acknowledge with appreciation Anabelle Lacroix, ACCA’s Curator, Public Programs, who has produced the performance program as a key component of the exhibition.

Many other colleagues have offered valuable expertise and advice, including Jude Adams, Eva Birch, John Cruthers, Jane Devery, Elizabeth Gertsakis, Jo Holder, Professor Anne Marsh, Dr Jacqueline Millner, Patrice Sharkey, Jasmine Stephens and Gemma Weston. Many thanks also to John Denton and Richard Leder at Corrs, Chambers, Westgarth.

A project of this scope is a complex technical and logistical undertaking, and we are thankful for technical support, advice and production from Phill Virgo and Shane Waghorne from Colour Factory, John Taylor from Decently Exposed, Michael Petrani from Diversity Rigging and Simone Tops.

146 147 ACCA BOARD ACCA STAFF Weekend Gallery Front Of House Volunteers DONORS FRIEND CONTEMPORARY CIRCLE Coordinators Josie Alexandra Paul Auckett John Denton Max Delany Hanna Chetwin Flory Anggi Paulina VISIONARY Professor Andrew Benjamin INAUGURAL ASSOCIATES Chair Artistic Director & CEO Anna Parlane Oskar Arnold The Macfarlane Fund John Betts & Robert Buckingham Michaela Davis Jacqui Shelton Eva Christoff Prescott Family Foundation* Bird de la Coeur Architects Richard Janko Lesley Alway Linda Mickleborough Rachael Collard Anonymous Helen Brack* Melissa Loughnan Deputy Chair Executive Director Gallery Attendants Anna May Cunningham Sally Browne Fund* Alrick Pagnon Arini Byng Sophia D’Urso Helen Clarke* Wesley Spencer Peter Doyle Annika Kristensen Maya Chakraborty Matt Dettmer LEGEND Jo Davenport Chair, Finance Senior Curator Hanna Chetwin Anne Dribbisch Tania & Sam Brougham* Andrew & Antje Geczy ASSOCIATES Committee Ruth Cummins Emily Dunstan J. Andrew Cook Andrew Landrigan & Brian Peel Fenina Acance Hannah Presley Sean Miles Aislinn Faulkner Vivien & Graham Knowles* Nicholas Lolatgis Paul Andrews John Dovaston Curator Anna Parlane Tegan Fonti Jane Morley* Kenneth W Park* Ariani Anwar Annemarie Kiely Lauren Ravi Beatrice Gabriel Drew Pettifer Kyp & Luisa Bosci Shelley Penn Samantha Vawdrey Jacqui Shelton Olivia Godfrey Professor Margaret Plant Brigid Brock Bernard Salt Exhibition Manager Ella Shi Brigid Hansen CHAMPION RAIDSTUDIO Alexya Campbell Steven Smith Hana Vasak Isabella Hone-Saunders Marc Besen AC & Eva Besen AO* Sue Rose & Alan Segal blackartprojects Andrew Taylor Anabelle Lacroix Agnes Whalan Emily Hubbard Morena Buffon & Santo Cilauro* Bernard Shafer Beth Fernon Curator, Public Emma Jensson John Denton & Susan Cohn* Steven Smith* Kylie T Forbes Programs Rosina Korschildgen Carole & John Dovaston Jennifer Strauss AM* Colin Golvan QC Krista Lyle Peter & Leila Doyle* Sydney Contemporary & Dr Deborah Golvan Eliza Devlin Holly Macdonald Margaret Morgan & Wesley Phoa Nella Themelios Jane Hayman Education Manager Chloe Martin Anna Schwartz Rosita Trinca Nick Hays Clare McLeod & Morry Schwartz AO* Noel & Jenny Turnbull* Regina Hill Kim Brockett Kana Miyazawa Michael Schwarz Jan Williams Anne Hindley Development Executive Emma Morrison & David Clouston* Lyn Williams AM* Adam Kaye Lily Palmer Bull Anonymous (1) Alana Kushnir & Shaun Cartoon Zahran Saheed Lisa Quinlan Briar Lloyd Finance Manager Cathryn Ross GUARDIAN Ross Lowe Pauline Rotsaert Lesley Alway & Paul Hewison* ENTHUSIAST Annabel Mactier Laura Couttie Sofia Skobeleva Anthony & Michele Boscia* Angela Brennan Claire Mazzone Visitor Services and Steven Tapping Robyn & Graham Burke* Mark Burry David Morgan Volunteer Program Keenan Thebus Beth Brown & Tom Bruce AM* Fiona Clyne in memory Brigitt Nagle Manager Camille Thomas Georgia Dacakis* of Dr Roger Woock These Are The Projects Genevieve Trail Annette Dixon* Dr Sue Dodd We Do Together Rosemary Forbes & Ian Hocking* Kate Long Sophie Weston Elly & Nathan Fink Adam Pustola Ginny & Leslie Green* Events and Venue Ece Yavuz Vida Maria Gaigalas RAIDSTUDIO Susan M Renouf* Manager Gia Zhou Gavin John & Francesca Black Reko Rennie Gary Singer & Geoffrey Smith* Kestin Family Foundation Claire Richardson

Laura De Neefe Coffee Cart Baristas Meredith King Jane Roberts Marketing and Tyson Campbell Wendy & Alan Kozica Lynda Roberts PATRON Partnerships Manager Jesse Dyer Damien Lentini Matthew Taylor Nicholas Brass & Zoe Ganim* Ander Rennick Nicholas Lolatgis* Moritz von Sanden Ingrid Braun* Philippa O’Brien John McNamara Howell Williams Andy Dinan & Mario Lo Giudice Development Bar Manager Gene-Lyn Ngian Anonymous (3) Dominic Dirupo & Natalie Dirupo Coordinator Jacob Taylor & Jeffrey Robinson Mark Fraser Julia Powles & Peter Westwood Sophie Gannon Andrew Atchison Allan & Eva Rutman Rachel Griffiths & Andrew Taylor* Artist Educator Jane Hemstritch* Katrina Sedgwick In Memory of Bill Lasica Eugene Shafir Shannon Lyons Marita & James Lillie Dr Nigel Simpson Educator and Program Lou & Will McIntyre Nga Tran Coordinator Mark & Louise Nelson Anna Waldmann Marita Onn & John Tuck Rosemary Walls Matt Hinkley Bruce Parncutt AO Brian Zulaikha Designer Jane Ryan & Nick Kharsas Anonymous (4) Alan & Carol Schwartz AM* Katrina Hall Dahle Suggett & Peter Cole* * denotes donors who have Publicist Irene Sutton* given for more than five years Jan van Schaik consecutively Sarah & Ted Watts

148 149 UNFINISHED BUSINESS Lead Partner Lead Donors Government Partner Exhibition Partners UNFINISHED BUSINESS: Margaret Morgan Perspectives on art & Wesley Phoa and feminism

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art Program Partner Symposium Partner Exhibition Partners 15 December 2017 –25 March 2018

Max Delany & Annika Kristensen (eds.)

Round Table Donors Media Partners Published 2017 © Australian Centre for

Lou & Will McIntyre Contemporary Art, artists and authors

The views and opinions ACCA Partners and Supporters expressed in this publication are those of the authors. Lead Partner Lead Partner No material, whether written or photographic, may be reproduced without permission of the artists, authors and Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.

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