Re-reading the 80s:

Feminisms as Process in Vancouver

27 February to 21 March 2004

Opening Reception: Thursday 26 February 2004 8 to 10 p.m.

Curator's Tours: Saturday 28 February and Sunday 29 February 2004 at 1 p.m.

Belkin Satellite, 555 Hamilton Street, Vancouver

Curated by Jessie Caryl

This exhibition reconsidered the critical strategies of artists Lorna Brown, Margot Leigh Butler, Allyson Clay, Laiwan, Jin-me Yoon, and the collaborative groups Worksite and the Association for Noncommercial Culture in relation to shifts in feminist theory and practice during the 1980s. The exhibition focused on book works, journal interventions, installations, and ephemera addressing the intersecting issues of gender, identity, language and representation.

Rejecting a notion of feminism as fixed, stable, and past, the title of this exhibition referred instead to multiple, diverse, and continually shifting investigations of differently gendered and racialized identities. In the 1980s and 1990s, activist groups representing provisional alignments of race, class, gender, and sexuality challenged the exclusionary biases of institutions including feminism and the mainstream art system. At the same time, a number of artists drew upon feminist, psychoanalytic and post-colonial theory in order to critique the dominant systems of representation involved in formulating and fixing identities.

Existing as a website outside the gallery and past the duration of the exhibition, Laiwan’s The Language of Mesmerization / The Mesmerization of Language tests the authority of language in imposing meaning.

• The exhibition coincided with InFest: International Artist Run Culture, a Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres event. It was the first in a series of exhibitions curated by Master of Arts candidates in the Critical Curatorial Studies Programme at the University of British Columbia. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Alvin Balkind Fund for Student Curatorial Initiatives.

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For further information please contact: Naomi Sawada at naomi.sawada@ubc.ca,
tel: (604) 822-3640, or fax: (604) 822-6689