Event
A Prelude: Practising Duets
Wednesday 18 September 2024
Griselda Pollock and Womanifesto in-conversation, chaired by Cooper Gallery Director Sophia Yadong Hao (online)
![Text box reads: Sit-in Curriculum #4 A Prelude Practising Duets Griselda Pollock and Womanifesto](http://cdn-acquia.dundee.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/featured_image_desktop_1440w/public/2024-08/Practising%20Duets.jpg?itok=3YHE2LpF)
Cooper Gallery
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design,
13 Perth Road,
Dundee,
DD1 4HT
As a prelude to The Ignorant Art School Sit-in #4 exhibition Outside the Circle, Cooper Gallery will host the fourth iteration of Practising Duets, a series of trans-disciplinary events organised by The Ignorant Art Schools, a research group of the British Art Network (BAN).
Sharing reflections on knowledge formation, alternative art pedagogies and internationalism charged by feminist solidarity, leading feminist, postcolonial and social art historian Griselda Pollock will be in conversation with Varsha Nair a founding member of Womanifesto, a Thailand based women artists’ collective.
The in-conversation is chaired by Sophia Yadong Hao, Director of Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee.
Griselda Pollock and Womanifesto will subsequently participate in the exhibition Sit-in #4: Outside the Circle as part of The Ignorant Art School: Five Sit-ins Towards Creative Emancipation programme at Cooper Gallery.
Booking
Book a free place via Eventbrite.
Event information
An audience Q&A will follow the in-conversation.
This is a large capacity online session held on Zoom. Audiences will receive a Zoom meeting link after registering a free place via Eventbrite. Live-captions available on Zoom.
![Portrait of Griselda Pollock and Varsha Nair. Griselda presents as a white woman with blond hair, wearing large round red necklace and earings. Varsha Nair presents as a South Asian woman, she is photographed in black and white wearing a black top and glasses in her hair](http://cdn-acquia.dundee.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/media_container_width_free_image/public/2024-08/Practising%20Duets%20GP%20VN.jpg?itok=Rf6cbB7T)
Speakers' Biographies
Griselda Pollock is a feminist, postcolonial and social art historian, cultural analyst and curator. Professor emerita of Social and Critical Histories of Art at the University of Leeds, she also directed the transdisciplinary Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (2001-21). In 1992 she developed a dedicated MA in Feminism and the Visual Arts. In 2020 she was awarded the Holberg Prize for her work in feminism and the arts, and the CAA Life-time Achievement Award for Writing on Art (2023) having received in 2010 CAA Distinguished Feminist Award for Promoting Equality in Art. A prolific writer and cultural theorist, her classic texts include Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology with Rozsika Parker (1981; 4th edition: 2022), Vision and Difference (1988), Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum (2007) and After-Image/After-Affect: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation (2013). Recent publications include Charlotte Salomon in the Theatre of Memory (2018), Mary Cassatt (new edition in full colour 2022), Killing Men & Dying Women: Imagining Difference in 1950s New York Painting (2022) and WOMAN IN ART: Helen Rosenau’s ‘Little Book’ of 1944 (2023). She has curated exhibitions on Christine Taylor Patten (2007, 2011) and on Bracha L. Ettinger (Memory and Migration, Freud Museum, 2009) and currently Medium and Memory (HackelBury Fine Art, London, 2023-24) catalogue available.
Varsha Nair is based in Baroda, India, where she studied painting at Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University. She lived in Thailand from 1995 to 2019 where as one of the key co-organizers of Womanifesto, she was instrumental in conceptualising projects that stretch beyond the traditional model of biennial exhibition-making to produce intergenerational and cross-disciplinary workshops, collaborations, and networks. She has exhibited internationally and presented at various symposia. Her writings have been published in n paradoxa, Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, and Ctrl+P Journal of Contemporary Art of which she is Editorial Board member. Varsha is currently Guest Lecturer with the Masters of Arts Program at HSLU, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts.
www.varshanair.studio
Womanifesto started out by hosting gatherings biannually from 1997 to build an international platform for women living in Thailand. It was first established by a group of women artists, writers and activists following an exhibition titled Tradisexion held in Bangkok in 1995. Womanifesto went on to develop a diverse range of activities spanning community-based workshops, publication and internet-related projects, workshops and residencies, and more recently a regular online meeting point entitled lasuemo (the last Sunday of each month).
Operating as a loose consortium of female practitioners, the collective is committed to supporting women’s practice through innovative projects that respond flexibly to the unfolding life events of the key members. Its organisational structure is centred around hospitality and collective generosity.
Since 2019, the Womanifesto Archives have been exhibited in multiple cities including Bangkok, Sydney and Hong Kong. In 2022, Womanifesto was featured in Documenta 15. In 2023, Nitaya established Baan Womanifesto in Udon Thani. This is Womanifesto’s first permanent space dedicated to its projects and wider engagement with the local community. Womanifesto held its first retrospective exhibition in Bangkok Art and Culture Centre in 2023.
www.womanifesto.com
Access
The event will be lived captioned on Zoom.
All enquiries please contact: exhibitions@dundee.ac.uk
About the exhibition
Outside the Circle, is an exhibition and event programme inspired by and generated from feminist and queer movements since the beginning of the 20th century that foregrounds intersectional feminist and queer strategies of radical emancipation, resistance, survival, and collective action as critical and pedagogical ‘ruptures’ in our lived experience. It is the fourth iteration of ongoing programme, The Ignorant Art School: Five Sit-ins Towards Creative Emancipation.
Visit
18 October 2024 – 1 February 2025
Monday – Saturday, 12–5pm
Images:
Portraits courtesy the contributors
Griselda Pollock portrait by University of Leeds, 2018
Funding support
The Ignorant Art School Sit-in #4 at Cooper Gallery, DJCAD is supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland.
Practising Duets Event Series is funded by the Research Groups programme at the British Art Network (BAN).
BAN is a Subject Specialist Network supported by Tate and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, with additional public funding provided by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
![logos for Cooper Gallery Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design and Creative Scotland](http://cdn-acquia.dundee.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/media_container_width_free_image/public/2024-08/TIAS%204%20logo%20block%20CG%20DJCAD%20CS.jpg?itok=08W5Z2Bp)
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Cooper Gallery
exhibitions@dundee.ac.uk