Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts

Basia Sliwinska, Catherine Dormor, Basia Sliwinska, Catherine Dormor

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781501358753
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501358739
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts interrogates the politics of space expressed via womxn's artistic practices, which prioritise solidarity and collaboration across borders, imagining attentive geographies of difference. It considers belonging as a manifestation of processes of becoming that traverse borders and generate new spaces and forms of difference. In doing so, the book aims to catalyse mutual social relations founded upon responsibility and response-ability to each other. The transnational framework activates concerns around belonging at a time of intensified divisions, partitioning global narratives, unequal trajectories and increasing violence against bodies of the most vulnerable, largely founded on Eurocentric paradigms of political, economic and cultural superiority.

The contributors engage in a conversation signalling transversal thinking and artmaking in order to articulate and activate 'in-between' spaces. This is to welcome co-affective models of belonging that question versatile embodiments of subjectivity as both agentic and as interrelational. Organised around the triangulation of modes of belonging: spatial, affective and collective, overarched by a transnational lens that acknowledges non-hierarchical, local and socially relevant genealogies against universalising politics of globalisation, these essays consider afresh ways in which female agency disrupts borders and activates concerns around different forms of belonging, citizenship and transnationalisms.

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

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Plates
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Frayed and Fraying: Textile Actions and the Edges of Belonging
• 2 Species of Space: Marisol, Marta Minujín and Nicola L on Party-Going, Domestic Mayhem and Nomadism
• 3 ‘with my portapak on my back’: Identity and Belonging in Shigeko Kubota’s Broken Diary
• 4 Patty Chang: Body, Performance and Transnational Border Crossings
• 5 Borderless and Undocumented: Day by Day in Southeast Asia
• 6 Suspended: Bahar Behbahani’s Displacement and Longing in the Persian Garden
• 7 Through Walls and Windows: Irene Buarque’s Work in the 1970s
• 8 Disrupting Subaltern Geographies: The Artistic Intersections of Belkis Ayón
• 9 Keren Anavy’s Garden of Living Images: Transnational Landscapes as Spaces of Ecological Order
• 10 Collective Agency: Creative Communities in Australian Feminist Art
• 11 ‘Woman Writing’ as a Curatorial Method: Narratives of Belonging in the Art Practices of Chantal Peñalosa and Bridget Smith
• 12 A Smuggler, a Butcher and a Fairy: Doing Things with One’s Body
• 13 Nieme Szaty Królowej (Queen’s Silent Robes): A Collective Walk Reclaiming Female Bodily Agency through Transnational Solidarity
• Contributors
• Index
• Plates