FEMMES & THEMS
2021
Image: Angelique Joy 2021 (RMIT Master of Photography candidate)
‘FEMMES & THEMS’
SYMPOSIUM & ONLINE EXHIBITION:
9:30 Wednesday 6 October 2021
Feminist & Queer Creative Practice, RMIT University School of Art
PROGRAM
Join us investigating feminist and queer creative practices at RMIT School of Art for the Femmes and Thems Symposium to be held Wednesday 6 October 2021. The program features students, artists and academics investigating themes and methodologies relevant to feminist and/or queer creative practice discussing their work-in-progress and resolved artwork. The aim of the symposium is to make ourselves visible to each other, to build community and discourse.
The symposium will feature a keynote presentation by the brilliant artist, filmmaker, and writer Zach Blas, Assistant Professor of Visual Studies in the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. “Blas’ work exemplifies the rigorous integration of material practice with theoretical investigation. His fierce engagement with the conceptual implications of creative practice is inspiring” says Dr Alison Bennett, theme leader of the CAST Queer(y)ing Creative Practice research project. “We are delighted that he has agreed to join us for this symposium.
Special guest Dr Margaret Mayhew (aka Mayhem) will introduce us to the fabulous work of ‘Queers Draw This’, a drawing group that emerged out of the 2020 Melbourne lockdowns. Queers Draw This “believe that drawing is fundamentally about connection: it is a space where we can pause and play with our sensations and experiences of being in a world that is often very hostile to queers. Drawing provides a safe space for queer bodies, and allows a space for secrets to be held or shared.” The group has grown to represent a fabulous and innovative response to the loss of community connection wrought by the pandemic.
RMIT University School of Art fosters a community of practice around feminist and queer creative practices, formally expressed through the FQCP Higher Degree Research project, and projects sponsored by Contemporary Art and Social Transformation, a research group based in the School of Art.
As stated in the School of Art Research Project description,
Feminist and queer creative practices are interrelated yet separate spheres of investigation with intersecting and diverging domains and positions. Feminist and queer creative practices share an interest in the construction of cultural paradigms, driven by an intersectional approach to social justice and embodied lived experience.
Feminist creative practice revisits and reclaims under-represented narratives, voices and practices that have historically defined and marginalized the feminine. Often operating in tandem with broader fields of social and environmental justice, feminist creative practice encompasses a broad spectrum of theories and approaches, from radical political defiance and subversive femininity to re-evaluations of the domestic sphere and 'women's work'.
Queerness is a slippery field that resists definition. More than an alternative term for homosexuality, queer liminality enables shifting coalitions of political and cultural positions. Creative strategies may critique, defy and ignore arbitrary normativity. Queer cultural practices have been deployed to interrogate the cultural construction of gender, race and disability.
In the 21st century, feminist and queer cultural practices are turning increasing towards new materialism, posthumanism and social practice to interrogate the agency of things and the culturally constituted hierarchies of objects and subjects. This area of focus is driven by a focus on the process of making as the method of research to generate reparative actions by gently holding together intersecting alliances of practice, ideology, politics and lived experience. We advocate praxis as a method for generating new knowledge.
Join us for a day of making kin!
SPEAKER ABSTRACTS & BIO STATEMENTS
KEYNOTE: ZACH BLAS
Assistant Professor of Visual Studies in the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto
zachblas.info
Zach Blas is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose practice spans moving image, computation, theory, performance, and science fiction. Blas engages the materiality of digital technologies while also drawing out the philosophies and imaginaries lurking in artificial intelligence, biometric recognition, predictive policing, airport security, the internet, and biological warfare. His work is in the collections of Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, and Whitney Museum of American Art. Blas’s practice been written about and featured in Artforum, Frieze, ArtReview, BBC, The Guardian, and The New York Times. Blas’s writings can be found in the collections You Are Here: Art After the Internet, Documentary Across Disciplines, Queer: Documents of Contemporary Art, as well as e-flux journal and various exhibition catalogues. With Melody Jue and Jennifer Rhee, he is co-editor of the anthology Informatics of Domination, forthcoming from Duke University Press. His artist monograph Unknown Ideals will be published by Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst and Sternberg Press in 2021.
SPECIAL GUEST Dr. Margaret Mayhew (aka Mayhem) (they/them): Queers Draw This
queersdrawthis.wordpress.com
IG @queersdrawthis
IG @dockta_mayhem
Dr Margaret Mayhew (aka Mayhem) will introduce us to the fabulous work of ‘Queers Draw This’, a life drawing group that emerged during the 2020 Melbourne lockdowns. Mayhew has researched, taught and practiced life drawing and queer performance for over two decades and is the author of the forthcoming volume "Looking at Life Drawing" (Bloomsbury 2023). They will share the experiences of the queer embodiments enabled by the heterotopic sites where digital media intersect with what is often depicted as 'pre-digital' or 'old school' media.
‘Queers Draw This’ is an online drawing group that emerged out of the lockdowns in Melbourne in 2020 when Queers of all stripes lost our access to queer venues and community. In 2021 we have managed to swap between live and online classes. We believe that drawing is fundamentally about connection: it is a space where we can pause and play with our sensations and experiences of being in a world that is often very hostile to queers. Drawing provides a safe space for queer bodies and allows a space for secrets to be held or shared. Queers draw this emphasises approaches to responsive drawing that are about accessibility and working with our strange and changing bodies and capacities to create a playful response to what we can sense.
Mayhem is an artist and ex-life model who did a PhD on modernist life-drawing teaching. They have a BFA from the National Arts School and have taught drawing in community centres, post-graduate design courses and immigration detention centres. Their teaching is informed by 25 years of drawing practice, yoga and body-mind practices based on trauma recovery and chronic pain management, as well as critical gender theory and cultural studies.
Tyler Payne (she/her): Keeping Time
PhD candidate, RMIT School of Art
tylerpayne.com.au
My presentation will discuss Keeping Time, a series of three electro-bricolage animations that investigate how myth cycles are rife with stories designed to oppress women by compromising their agency. These narratives often “legitimise male privilege by muting female authority” (Johnson, 2016). Kim Kardashian is the muse of these animations. After bursting into the public consciousness, achieving wide notoriety and fame in 2007 with a sex-tape, Kardashian has built a billion-dollar empire. My work is preoccupied with the invention of social media, which has enabled the intrusion of capitalist commodification into more intimate forms of everyday life (the commodification of communication via emojis for example). In terms of a capitalist who has mastered accumulation through these new commodity forms, Kim Kardashian is, in my view, exemplary. The animations are littered with visual examples from the representations that prop up her beauty empire. The project of the Kardashian body restores the symbolic demands of the male gaze in the digital world of representation of women’s bodies. In this way, Kardashian has cosmetically enhanced and shaped her body to become a kind of ‘surrealist’ object, a superimposition of the ideal and the real.
I am a new-media artist based in Melbourne. My work focuses on the genre of self-portraiture in photography and video to investigates the ambivalent relationship of contemporary women’s embodiment to the male gaze, as curated by the lens of gendered advertising. My current work interrogates the impact of social media platforms on women’s experience of their bodies, and explores how women’s own agency interacts with these dominant visual cultures. Using a combination of video, still photography and electro-bricolage, my work exposes the oppressive nature of digital platforms and the harms inherent to fitness and celebrity culture. My work assembles a critique of aspects of everyday life: namely, of the un-realistic level of correction needed to present an acceptable representation of women’s embodied selves. I am currently a PhD candidate and lecturer at RMIT University.
Jenny Hickinbotham (she/her): What is mental health?
RMIT Master of Fine Art candidate
jennyhickinbotham.com
My search for core balance or integration has been ongoing since first taking adult conscious steps to address my ‘voices’ the inner experience of hearing voices talking to me during my daily activities and at night as I tried to sleep.
There are three types of voice hearing, and research shows about 10% of adults talk opening about hearing voices which are helpful to them. Why then does psychiatry label people who’s voices are difficult and challenging to their capacity to function within humanity’s systems, why are they labelled schizophrenic, forced to take strong sedating medications and/or endure electroconvulsive ‘therapies’ and/or get locked up in mental health hospital wards? This is the outdated medical model Australian systems support.
My life has been victimised by patriarchs and patriarchy. I experienced childhood abuse and trauma at the hands of me who took advantage of my naive parents, in particular my mother. Father's role was to administer punishments at the end of his working day, other than that he was a fair and gentle carer. Mother followed the beliefs, attitudes and values of men, relatives, community leaders and scientist. As a new born I was breast fed every three hours, laid in my crib and not touched again until the next feed, this was the advice of science to avoid spoiling children. When my parents travelled overseas in 1963 my uncle sold me to sexually exploitative people. Diagnosed with Aspergers, Developmental Trauma, complex PTS and paranoid schizophrenia, the mental health system has provided some talking support, much inside my head, but little practical therapy. As a Masters by Coursework student at RMIT my art practice gives presence and voice to my lived experience. My research supports new trauma therapies, approaches to intervention and supports for people challenged by trauma inspired mental health challenge. Video, sound, performance and installation are my featured art practices. I write poetry/song, record and perform them.
Anne M Carson: ‘Poetics of restitution as a feminist creative writing strategy
RMIT PhD candidate
annemcarson.com
In this presentation I explore a ‘poetics of restitution’ as a feminist creative writing method. ‘Restitution poetics’ operates on two levels – first restoring the stories of neglected figures from history. In my current PhD creative writing project, I am writing poetic biographies of two creative women of accomplishment whose stories have been overshadowed in Australia at least by eminent male partners, and overlooked by anglophone discourse. These women are 18thcentury German soprano singer and harpsichordist (and Johann Sebastian’s second wife) Anna Magdalena Bach, and 19th century French novelist and social radical, George Sand (also Frederic Chopin’s partner). Second, restitution poetics contributes to restoring a creative women’s lineage, or in New Materialist Rosi Braidotti’s terms, the ‘composition of a we’, an essential part of post-anthropocentric feminism.
Women’s omission from the record perpetuates gender limiting beliefs about women’s creative capacities, skewing and impoverishing the record, leaving fewer role models for future generations, and contributing to justifications for the continuation of patriarchy. A ‘poetics of restitution’ positions poetic biography as both a political and aesthetic act. It also attends to and arises from my own subjective responses of outrage and grief at how stories of creative women of accomplishment have been excised from the historical record. I examine the form’s similarity to and difference from Susan’s Best’s ‘aesthetics of reparation’, which is in turn grounded in the work of Melanie Klein and Eve Kovolsky Sedgewick.
Anne M Carson is a poet, essayist and visual artist who is also a third-year creative writing candidate at RMIT. Feminism is an important strand in her PhD, as it is in her life. After a decade working in the delivery of women’s services in the 1980’s (domestic violence, health and legal), she turned her attention to artistic pursuits. She has spent the last twenty years honing, principally, her poetic skills. She has had over 200 poems published in literary and other journals in Australia and internationally, broadcast on National and community radio, and has curated two programmes for ABC’s Radio National flagship poetry Programme, PoeticA.
J Rosenbaum (they/them):AI & gender
RMIT School of Art PhD candidate
jrosenbaum.com.au
IG @minxdragon
My PhD work is about computer perceptions of gender and I will be presenting some of my findings, my art and the development of my work and themes. I will discuss how I produce the work I have made and how my processes have led to my findings and results. My work is science, it is programming, it is social, it is artistic, and it is bringing all of these things together to make coherent art that articulates the problem and shows that while AI is frequently used in gender detection, it is also unsuited for the task. Gender is a human social construct that is not always apparent on the surface. Gender is internal and powerful but while it is performative, it is also not always readily detectable in a meaningful way by AI.
I am a PhD candidate at RMIT looking at computer perceptions of gender. I am queer and use they/them pronouns, I find my myriad identities permeate everything I do. My art, my programming, everything, is created through a queer lens.
I am in my third year of my PhD and am exploring the disruption of image generation systems as a way to combat bias, I've looked at combinations of AI systems working together to explore gender and I am building a gender classifier that illustrates the uniqueness of gender. All of these projects together illustrate the power of AI, but also its fallibility and inadequacy when looking at something as human, as unique, as gender.
Angelique Joy (they/them): neuroqueer cyborg potentialities
RMIT Master of Photography candidate
angeliquejoy.com
IG @angeliquejoy.creative
Our world is created by diverse ways of being; stories within stories and worlds within worlds. These worlds co-exist connect and converge, or at times, oppose, suppress and dominate. This proposed body of work is an attempt at cyborg writing; to claim space for the expansion and unfolding for those who diverge from neuronormative ways of being, for example, Autistic people. This work contributes to the neurodiversity social justice movement. The proposed cyborg writing is an imagining for an intersectional, neurodiverse and neurocosmopolitan future.
The narrative investigates binary relationships between the virtual and the real and the imperfect and the perfect; seeking to create transversal connections between opposing ways of being in an attempt to dissolve the ‘other’. The work presents a literal destruction of the ‘perfect’ single story of being. It is about integrating technology into the body in a way that is in service of ourselves, in a way that challenges ideas of gender and abled bodies. It is a story about the systematic othering of those who are on the edges of normative social paradigms, specifically, autistic bodies/beings and claims space for them in science fiction past-future narratives. This is an attempt to re-code those narratives and make space for co-creating new modes of being.’
Angelique Joy is a neuroqueer, gender non-compliant visual artist working within the field of expanded photography. Currently, Angelique is studying a Master of Photography at RMIT, living and working on Kaurna Land, Adelaide. Their practice has sought to interrogate ‘self’ and space; aiming to create a transversal connection between the two. Angelique’s intrigue into spaces: the spaces we inhabit; the spaces we claim; and the spaces we are kept from, began with a curiosity into the cultural and physical spaces we all unfold within and how each ‘self’ is constructed within that. This exploration of space upon our sense of self feature heavily in their work. Angelique is interested in how the physical and the virtual, the imaged and the real intersect with identity. Their work is concerned with binary ways of being- the dominant and the other, neurotypical and neuroqueer; through a posthuman, transversal method of connecting polarities and disparate ways of being they are seeking to (neuro)queer neuronormative and gendernormative oppressive expectations. Their current work is an attempt at cyborg writing; a reimagining for potential posthuman utopias
Daniel Marks: .EXXXXU: Excising the Interface
RMIT School of Art PhD candidate
danielrmarks.com
IG @daniel.r.marks
At once performance-lecture and reflective activation of prior digital art project }.̶e̶x̶x̶x̶x̶u̶.̶e̶x̶x̶x̶x̶u̶.̶e̶x̶x̶x̶x̶u̶.̶e̶x̶x̶x̶x̶u̶{ (developed in collaboration with artist Mohamed Chamas in late 2020/early 2021) and the tangents of practice which have arisen from this work, .EXXXXU: Excising the Interface intends to demonstrate poetic, collaborative and nonlinear strategies of working through the complexities of embodiment inherent to cybernetic forms of agency.
}.̶e̶x̶x̶x̶x̶u̶.̶e̶x̶x̶x̶x̶u̶.̶e̶x̶x̶x̶x̶u̶.̶e̶x̶x̶x̶x̶u̶{, taking reference from the “Let’s Play” genre of externally-narrated video game footage, re-fashions the interface from a membrane of contact between the body and the digital to a convoluted zone of transgressive gamification. Speaking through this work to situate the experimental gestures of my doctoral research, which aims to develop a critically non-binary model of performance practice, this presentation will continue and expand upon the processes of the project: queering binary narratives of bodily integrity in screen-space through convolution and re-configuration of the interface.
Daniel R Marks (DRM) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Naarm/Melbourne, currently undertaking a practice-led PhD at RMIT University on the topic of diagrammatic, intertextual and archaeological approaches to performance-installation practice. They have shown and performed projects at multiple galleries and artist-run initiatives in Naarm and regional Victoria, including RMIT Gallery, La Trobe Art Institute, Wyndham Art Gallery, Testing Grounds, BLINDSIDE, KINGS Artist-run, and Trocadero Art Space.
DRM is affiliated with the Performing Dress Lab, which operates between RMIT, University of the Arts London, and Aalto University (Finland), and is currently a mentor for the Trocadero Art Space (Footscray) Peer-to-Peer artist support program.
My art practice, and more specifically my doctoral research, seeks to unearth radical gestures of dis/embodiment in multi-modal performance – a critically non-binary practice of splitting and folding linear narratives of action and representation into vessels, devices and tools of queer potentiality
Karen Song: Female Monologues
RMIT Master of Photography candidate
IG @karensong__
Female Monologues is a female-focused and female led project. It has incorporated nude, self-portraiture, and portrait photography to reveal the relationship of woman with her inward self. This project has collaborated with women from different nations, ages, and self-identities. It respects and focuses on uniqueness for whoever participated in this project and presents a series of photographs with tenderness, gaze inward oneself, the flow of sensitivity for one’s self-acceptance, and resemblance the forms of body integrated into landscape through the monochromatic lens. And through demolish the constraint of female imagery that often been seen and used as an ‘object’ to reflect and respond to the spectator’s desire within the male gaze to liberate the female from inside-out and the unseeing burdens and anxiety that worried for been judged by others.
Karen Song is a current MOP student at RMIT, and a fashion photographer based in Melbourne. 'Female Monologues' is her first project to explore and documented real women in real circumstances during her master program.
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