Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts

by Basia Sliwinska (Editor), Catherine Dormor (Editor)

Overview

This book builds new visions of belonging and new articulations of place and space through various models of artistic practice by women. Exploring how these practices reclaim and renegotiate space - institutional, urban, or natural - it interrogates the politics of artistic practice as a means of creating transnational networks of solidarity.

Presenting a collection of case studies detailing the practices of womxn artists from China, Europe, North America and Latin America, the book considers relationships between artmaking, process and belonging. This transnational framework activates solidarity at a time of intensified divisions, partitioning global narratives, unequal trajectories.

The contributors engage in a conversation signalling transversal thinking and artmaking in order to articulate and activate 'in-between' spaces. Organised around the triangulation of modes of belonging: spatial, affective and collective, these essays consider ways in which female agency disrupts borders and activates concerns around different forms of citizenship. Considering the current time of rising nationalisms and erecting borders, this book offers new narratives that build bridges across cultures; it's wide coverage will inform new directions in interdisciplinary research in visual culture, feminism, transnationalism, and cross-cultural anthropology.

Cover Image credit: Keren Anavy, Garden of Living Images (2018), general installation view (detail). Courtesy of the artist and Wave Hill. Photographer: Stefan Hagen

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501388378
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	01/09/2025
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Basia Sliwinska is an art historian and theorist working as a Research Fellow at the NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal. Recent books include Feminist Visual Activism and the Body, editor (2021), The Evolution of the Image: Political Action and the Digital Self, co-editor (2018) and the monograph The Female Body in the Looking-Glass: Contemporary Art, Aesthetics and Genderland (2016).

Catherine Dormor is Reader in Textile Practices and Head of Research Programmes at the Royal College of Art, UK. A practicing artist and researcher, her recent publications include the co-edited book The Erotic Cloth: Seduction and Fetishism in Textiles (2018) and A Philosophy of Textile: Between Practice & Theory (2020). She is Regional Editor (Europe) for Textile: the Jourbanal of Cloth & Culture and her artworks feature in a number of international collections.

Table of Contents

List of Plates
List of Figures
Acknowledgements

Introduction, Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts, Catherine Dormor (Royal College of Art, UK) and Basia Sliwinska (NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal)
1. Frayed & Fraying: textile actions and the edges of belonging, Catherine Dormor (Royal College of Art, UK)
2. Species of Space: Marisol, Marta Minujín and Nicola L on Party-going, Domestic Mayhem and Nomadism, Flavia Frigeri (National Portrait Gallery, London)
3. 'With my portapak on my back': Identity and Belonging in Shigeko Kubota's Broken Diary, Helena Shaskevich (CUNY, USA)
4. Patty Chang: Body, Performance, and Transnational Border Crossings, Jane Chin Davidson (Board Member of Art Jourbanal)
5. Borderless and Undocumented: Day by Day in Southeast Asia, Cristina Nualart (IE University, Spain)
6. Suspended: Bahar Behbahani's Displacement and Longing in the Persian Garden, Aliza Edelman (independent curator, art historian, and editor)
7. Through Walls and Windows: Irene Buarque ´s work in the 1970s, Margarida Brito Alves and Giulia Lamoni (NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal)
8. Disrupting Subaltern Geographies: The Artistic Intersections of Belkis Ayón, Samantha A. Noël (Wayne State University, USA)
9. Keren Anavy's Garden of Living Images: Transnational Landscapes as Spaces of Ecological Order, Aliza Edelman (independent curator, art historian, and editor) and Ketzia Alon (independent academic, social activist, art curator and critic)
10. Collective Agency: Creative Communities in Australian Feminist Art, Rachael Haynes (QUT, Australia) and Courtney Pedersen (Queensland University of Technology, Australia)
11. Woman Writing' as a Curatorial Method: Narratives of Belonging in the Art Practices of Chantal Peñalosa and Bridget Smith, Caroline Stevenson (London College of Fashion, UAL, UK)
12. A Smuggler, a Butcher, and a Fairy: Doing Things with One's Body, Jana Kukaine and Janis Taurens (Art Academy of Latvia)
13. Nieme Szaty Królowej (Queen's Silent Robes): a collective walk re-claiming female bodily agency through transnational solidarity, Basia Sliwinska (NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal)

Notes on Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts is highly accessible. Using interdisciplinary methods, the authors synthesize key theorists... and theoretical concepts in ways a student-reader will find familiar and useful in informing their own related practices, including research, writing, and art-making” —Maria Costantino, Woman's Art Jourbanal

“This is an impressive collection of essays that addresses, through a feminist lens, important and timely issues. Examining various genres of art from across the globe, and representing diverse topics, Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts is an important contribution to the existing literature on feminist art practice.” —Maria Photiou, Art Historian and Research Fellow, University of Derby, UK

“One of the urgent issues of our day remains the European invention of the nation state. Combined with issues of climate and poverty, crossing national borders and belonging as a citizen are matters of life itself. This book responds to this conjuncture of crises and its need for an actively intersectional understanding of consequent manifestations of art and gender. Grounded in extensive feminist thinking, focused on particular exemplars of artists and artworks, and structured around "three modes of belonging: spatial, affective, and collective", it promises to be an essential contribution to the discussion as it unfolds in the contemporary art world.” —Hilary Robinson, Professor of Feminism, Art, and Theory, Loughborough University, UK

“Connecting global artists to multiple conversations about economics, gender and politics, this volume will be an invaluable guide for readers interested in the responses by contemporary feminist artists to myriad capitalist, patriarchial and imperial structures – a must read on this topic.” —Anne Swartz, Professor of Art History, Savannah College of Art and Design, USA

“Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts encapsulates the breadth and the beauty, as well as the critical challenge, of art that makes worlds in the margins, along the edges and through the charged spaces of the in-between.

Never reducing the wonderfully diverse particularities of the transnational case studies brought together in the volume, Dormor and Sliwinska manage the complex task of creating a dialogue between them with care-filled attention and a clarity of purpose. This is a book that speaks to a difficult present, without losing hope for the possibility of belonging, together, in a more generous and equitable future.” —Marsha Meskimmon, Professor of Transnational Art and Feminism, and Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies, Loughborough University, UK

From the Publisher