Feminist Duration Reading Group: Women at Work

Tue 3 Oct, 7-9pm
SPACE Mare Street
Free & all welcome

The October meeting of the Feminist Duration Reading Group comprises a performance-based collective reading of the first seminar of Women at Work: A Week of Women’s Performance in Australia. This programme of performances, seminars and documentation from women around Australia took place at the George Paton Galleries in Melbourne in June 1980. It was the first project to highlight relationships between feminism and performance art in Australia, and the publication today remains a rare focus on this critical, albeit under-represented, field.

Hosted by curator Laura Castagnini and artist Diana Baker Smith, we will read aloud the conversation staged in 1980, in which participants discussed their own work as well as feminist issues more generally. Thereafter we will consider the relevance of such projects in the contemporary context, in particular attending to the changing nature of labour and ideas of collective action.

This event is the first outcome of Women at/and Work, a new research-driven creative project examining connections between feminist art and activism in Australia and the UK.

The Feminist Duration Reading Group focuses on under-known and under-appreciated feminist texts, movements, groups and struggles from outside the Anglo-American feminist tradition. Started at Goldsmiths, University of London, in March 2015, since July 2015 it has met at SPACE, 129 – 131 Mare Street in Hackney.

The group generally meets on the first Tuesday of the month at 7pm and is open to people of all genders. 

If you would like to join the Feminist Duration Reading Group mailing list, or propose a focus for a subsequent session, please email feministduration@gmail.com.