Welcome to this Study Room Guide on Live Art and Feminism curated by Lois Weaver in collaboration with PhD candidate Eleanor Roberts and the Live Art Development Agency.

Existing both in printed form and as an online resource, this multi-layered, multi-voiced Guide is a key component of LADA’s Restock Rethink Reflect project on Live Art and Feminism.

Download PDF Versions of the Guide

 

What’s in this Guide?

The Guide features a conversation between Lois Weaver and LADA’s Lois Keidan about this project and their own personal histories of feminism and performance; a critical overview by Eleanor Roberts of this research, dialogue and mapping project; a series of maps created by artists reflecting their own experiences and influences in feminist performance; a How We Did It section by Lois Weaver on her approach to this project and this Guide; and extensive lists of resources with catalogue references on materials on feminist performance housed in the LADA Study Room.

 

Restock Rethink Reflect

Restock, Rethink, Reflect is an ongoing series of initiatives for, and about, artists who working with issues of identity politics and cultural difference in radical ways, and which aims to map and mark the impact of art to these issues, whilst supporting future generations of artists through specialized professional development, resources, events and publications.

Following the first two Restock, Rethink, Reflect projects on Race (2006-08) and Disability (2009-12), Restock, Rethink, Reflect Three (2013-15) is on Feminism – on the role of performance in feminist histories and the contribution of artists to discourses around contemporary gender politics.

 

Restock, Rethink, Reflect Three 

Restock, Rethink, Reflect Three has involved collaborations with UK and European partners on programming, publishing and archival projects, including a LADA curated programme, Just Like a Woman, for City of Women Festival, Slovenia in 2013, the co-publication of re.act.feminism – a performing archive in 2014, and the Fem Fresh platform for emerging feminist practices with Queen Mary University of London.

Central to Restock, Rethink, Reflect Three has been a research, dialogue and mapping project led by Lois Weaver and supported by a CreativeWorks grant. This project set out to share knowledge and shed new light on contemporary and historical feminist practitioners, particularly those left out of official histories or that have been unrecorded or forgotten about. The project took many forms including the development of the materials we hold on Feminist practices in our Study Room research facility and the creation of this new Guide which will help artists, students, activists and thinkers to navigate their way through LADA’s holdings in relation to feminist practices and issues in Live Art, past and present.

 

Acknowledgements 

The Restock, Rethink, Reflect Three project and this Study Room Guide could not have been created without the invaluable, enthusiastic and generous contributions of many people to whom enormous thanks are due: to those who attended Coffee Table discussions on Diversity, Early Days and Archiving and contributed to the Cocktail Seminar on Archiving (see How We Did It for contributors’ names); to those who came to the Long Tables; to those who contributed to the Wikipedia Edit-a-thon; to those who took part in the I Wasn’t There screenings; and to those who made maps.

Supported by Creativeworks, London.