OCCUPY PPV#07: Pain and its Politics

Rachel will discuss the politics of representing suffering in feminist practice, focusing on artists whose work examines different kinds of hurt and injury. This conversation will explore questions of bodily empathy, the politics of emotions, and how a visual language of pain might act for feminism. 

Registration is free but essential.

Speaker:

Dr Rachel Warriner is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at The Courtauld, where she has been working on the project Feminist Arts-Activism, New York: Collectives, Actions, Agitations. She is also the convenor of The Courtauld’s Gender and Sexuality Research Group and Group Work Network, and Founder of and Curator at Pluck Projects with Sarah Kelleher.

This event will be chaired by Daša Anosova (UCL SSEES) 

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This talk is a part of the public programme contextualising the exhibition I AM NOT HERE TO BE STRONGER THAN YOU co-curated by Daša Anosova and Alexandra Tryanova at Mimosa House in London. The show is the first major presentation of works by Alyona Tokovenko and AntiGonna - contemporary Ukrainian artists working with transgressive practices, radical intimacy, and personal traumatic memories.

In the exhibition, autobiographical narratives are manifested through the acts of (auto)eroticism, transgression and pornographic imagery incorporating painting, sculpture, installation, video, and viscerally embodied live art. Hurt and injured bodies are present in the gallery space in the form of moving image and morphing canvases, while pain, as a visual language, and a key theme of the artists’ works, addresses the politics of the moment. 

The talk will take place in the exhibition space where the participants will have an opportunity to learn more about both artists' artistic practices. Learn more about the show here. 

In partnership with FRINGE: UCL's Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity.

Image credit: Nancy Spero, Helicopter Blinding Victims, 1968. Gouache and ink on paper, 59.7 x 90, 4cm. A detail used on the cover of 'Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art: Activism in the Work of Nancy Spero' by Rachel Warriner