Girls in Revolt! at Tate Britain

This autumn, Tate Britain will current Girls in Revolt!, a landmark exhibition of feminist artwork within the UK from 1970 to 1990. It’ll discover how interconnected networks of girls used radical concepts and rebellious strategies to make a useful contribution to British tradition. Showcasing work by over 100 ladies artists and collectives residing and dealing within the UK, this would be the first main survey of its form.

Helen Chadwick, Within the Kitchen (Range), 1977 © The Property of the Artist. Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery, London and Rome – Girls in Revolt! at Tate Britain

Portray, drawing, pictures, textiles, printmaking, movie, sculpture, and archival supplies will probably be introduced collectively to map a panorama of artistic follow cast towards a backdrop of utmost social, financial, and political change. In addition to celebrating the work of well-known artists equivalent to Sonia Boyce, Susan Hiller and Linder, Girls in Revolt! will platform many ladies, who regardless of lengthy careers, have been largely left exterior the inventive narratives of the time. Proven in a significant institutional exhibition for the primary time will probably be works by Poulomi Desai and Shirley Cameron amongst many others.

Offered chronologically, the exhibition will start with the primary ladies’s liberation convention within the UK, Miss World protests and the formation of the Brixton Black Girls’s Group. Artists equivalent to Margaret Harrison, Penny Slinger and Monica Sjöö subvert the anticipated roles of girls in society, whereas Kate Walker, Monica Ross and Su Richardson labored collectively on a postal artwork undertaking, demonstrating how communities of girls discovered methods to work collaboratively with out formal infrastructure. Many of those items haven’t been proven for the reason that 1970’s.

This era noticed a dramatic evolution of the connection between ladies, work, and the home surroundings. Frustration with an expectation of home labour is the topic of labor by Bobby Baker, posters by See Pink Girls’s Workshop and pictures by Alexis Hunter, while The Hackney Flashers and Tina Keane take into account the social and political implications of elevating youngsters in Who’s Holding the Child 1978 and Clapping Songs 1979. Sculptures by Rita McGurn and Elizabeth Radcliffe provide glamorous imagined photographs of the self, utilizing strategies like crochet: usually underappreciated due to their connection to home labour.

The exhibition will discover the artistic affect of Punk and Submit-punk with collage, pictures and movie from artists and musicians like Marian Elliott-Stated (A.Okay.A Poly Styrene),The Neo Naturists, and Gina Birch. The consideration of intercourse within the follow of artists can also be explored, from Cosey Fanni Tutti’s efficiency work to Jill Westwood’s Potent Feminine, 1983. Protest led by ladies is a core theme all through the present. Banners, posters, and journals from the Greenham Widespread and Part 28 protests, and anti-racism and AIDS campaigns are accompanied by documentary pictures from Format Images Company, Mumtaz Karimjee, Bhajan Hunjan and Caroline Coon, affirming ladies’s central position on this activism. A serious sculpture by Margaret Harrison which references the fences of Greenham Widespread will probably be put in alongside protest banners by Thalia Campbell.

The affect of girls artists who have been concerned in key actions just like the BLK Artwork Group and the advocacy group and archive Panchayat will probably be explored, in addition to their position within the first Nationwide Black Artwork Conference in 1982 and ongoing contribution to British Black and South Asian feminist artwork discourses. Alongside works by key figures like Lubaina Himid, Sutapa Biswas, Claudette Johnson, Pratibha Parmar and Rita Keegan are works that are being specifically conserved for the exhibition equivalent to Nina Edge’s Snakes and Ladders 1985, an set up made from batik on paper and ceramics, which regardless of that includes on the duvet of Maud Salter’s landmark 1990 guide Ardour: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity, has not been proven in over three many years.

The exhibition will shut with work made in direction of the tip of the Thatcher administration, specializing in ladies’s response to Part 28, the visibility of lesbian communities and the AIDS epidemic by artists together with Tessa Boffin and Jill Posener. Girls in Revolt! concludes with works that mirror on the altering financial panorama and ladies’s place inside it by Pleasure Gregory, Franki Raffles and Roshini Kempadoo.

Listing of artists

Brenda Agard; Sam Ainsley; Simone Alexander; Bobby Baker; Anne Bean; Zarina Bhimji; Gina Birch; Sutapa Biswas; Tessa Boffin; Sonia Boyce; Chila Kumari Singh Burman; Shirley Cameron; Thalia Campbell; Helen Chadwick; Jennifer Comrie; Judy Clark; Caroline Coon; Eileen Cooper; Stella Dadzie; Poulomi Desai; Vivienne Dick; Nina Edge; Marian Elliott-Stated (Poly Styrene); Rose English; Catherine Elwes; Cosey Fanni Tutti; Aileen Ferriday; Format Photographers Company; Chandan Fraser; Melanie Buddy; Carole Gibbons; Penny Goring; Pleasure Gregory; Hackney Flashers; Margaret Harrison; Mona Hatoum; Susan Hiller; Lubaina Himid; Amanda Vacation; Bhajan Hunjan; Alexis Hunter; Kay Fido Hunt; Janis Okay. Jefferies; Claudette Johnson; Mumtaz Karimjee; Tina Keane; Rita Keegan; Mary Kelly; Rose Finn-Kelcey; Roshini Kempadoo; Del La Grace Volcano; Sarah Lahire; Lenthall Street Workshop; Linder; Loraine Leeson; Alison Lloyd; Rosy Martin; Rita McGurn; Ramona Metcalfe; Jacqueline Morreau; The Neo Naturists; Lai Ngan Walsh; Houria Niati; Annabel Nicolson; Ruth Nowaczek; Hannah O’Shea; Pratibha Parmar; Symrath Patti; Ingrid Pollard; Jill Posener; Elizabeth Radcliffe; Franki Raffles; Samena Rana; Su Richardson; Liz Rideal; Robina Rose; Monica Ross; Erica Rutherford; Maureen Scott; Lesley Sanderson; See Pink Girls’s Workshop; Gurminder Sikand; Sister Seven; Monica Sjöö; Veronica Slater; Penny Slinger; Marlene Smith; Maud Sulter; Jo Spence; Suzan Swale; Anne Tallentire; Shanti Thomas; Martine Thoquenne; Gee Vaucher; Suzy Varty, Christine Voge; Kate Walker; Jill Westwood; Nancy Willis; Christine Wilkinson; Vera Productions, Shirley Verhoeven.

Girls in Revolt! at Tate Britain eighth November 2023 – seventh April 2024, tate.org.uk

The exhibition is curated by Linsey Younger, Curator, Up to date British Artwork, Tate; with Zuzana Flaskova, Assistant Curator, Trendy and Up to date British Artwork, Tate; Hannah Marsh, Assistant Curator, Up to date British Artwork, Tate and Inga Fraser, Assistant Curator, Trendy British Artwork, Tate. Movie co-curation by Lucy Reynolds, Senior Lecturer, Westminster Faculty of Arts.

The exhibition title comes from Eve Figes’s 1970 textual content Patriarchal Attitudes: The Case for Girls in Revolt.

The exhibition has been developed with the help of advisors: Griselda Pollock, Professor, Faculty of Fantastic Artwork, Leeds and recipient of the 2019 Holburg Prize in recognition of her contribution to feminist concept; Marlene Smith, artist, curator, and founding member of the BLK Artwork Group and lead researcher for Black Artists and Modernism with the College of the Arts London and the College of Middlesex; Althea Greenan, Curator of the Girls’s Artwork Library, Goldsmiths.

With extra help from Stella Dadzie, Suzanne Scafe, Juliet Jacques and Lucy Whitman.

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