Productive Refusals

Stemming from a workshop led by Reckitt for the Freelands Foundation’s Artist Programme Symposium in 2019, the essay explores how saying ‘no’ can be a productive response to exploitative work situations and the subjective habits that they engender. Drawing from her own experience of working in the cultural sector, Reckitt highlights a range of recent artistic, cultural, and activist tactics of refusal

Wendelien van Oldenburgh: The Past is Never Dead

Focusing on the two works featured in Wendelien van Oldenburg’s first solo exhibition in Canada, at A Space, Toronto - Instruction and Après - the essay discusses the Dutch artist’s collaborative and inter-textual approach to film making. While considering the two films' examination of institutional frameworks that curtail collective and personal expression and agency, the essay shows how the films also suggest the possibilities for resistance and critique when people push back against punitive conditions. The text highlights van Oldenburg’s debt to the experimental political practices of film maker Peter Watkin and theatre director Augusto Boal, arguing that her works stimulates the critical faculties and potential for change in subjects and viewers alike

Feminist acts of resistance and withdrawal in London

Review of the group exhibition 'Do you keep thinking there must be another way,' featuring work by Georgia Horgan, Howardena Pindell, Polvo de Gallina Negra (Black Hen Powder), Raju Rage and various collaborators/contributors, Lee Lozano, Georgia Sagri, and Emma Talbot, at Mimosa House, London

Giving it Time: Thoughts on the Feminist Duration Reading Group

As part of ‘Never the Same: what (else) can art writing do?’ at Calgary Contemporary, Helena Reckitt discussed the Feminist Duration Reading Group which has gathered in London since March 2015 to discover and discuss under-known and under-valued texts, ideas and struggles from outside the Anglo-American feminist canon. Explaining how the group emerged from an interest in the collective exploration of recently-published texts from the Italian feminist movement of the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s – in a reading group that originally took place at Goldsmiths, University of London, before moving to SPACE gallery and studio complex in East London – Reckitt described the group’s key areas of focus. These include: - Italian feminist practices and modes of thinking such as autocoscienza (consciousness raising); emotional and professional withdrawal; non-assimilation; rejection of equal rights rhetoric; relational politics; and practices of affidamento (entrustment). - Legacies of thought, cultural activity and political practice inspired by, and in alliance with, Italian feminist practices, including the tactics of Human Strike articulated by Claire Fontaine. - Broadening and contesting historic feminist understanding of gender binaries. - Reorienting feminist critical, artistic and activist genealogies away from those rooted into practices dominated by, or implicitly, white or Anglo-American. Describing the group's operations, Reckitt described its emphasis on reading texts out loud, rather than expecting participants to read texts in advance, as a way of breaking down the difference between ‘experts’ and ‘novices.’ She outlined the group’s commitment to the durational work of maintaining queer feminist histories which, in the words of art historian Amelia Jones, “reactivates them by returning them to process and embodiment — linking the interpreting body of the present with the bodies referenced or performed in the past [...].” She also noted how the group nonetheless attempts to heed the cautionary advice of Gayatri Spivak in The Politics of Translation (1996), resisting too easy a notion of translation; trying not to iron out differences in context across time, place, culture, and language; and not being overly constrained or pre-determined by earlier positions and perspectives. Reckitt noted that she had some concerns about how the current emphasis on discursive and ephemeral arts programming can result in non-production of lasting documents, like exhibition catalogues, which enable feminisms to be transmitted to subsequent generations. Nonetheless, she emphasised the valuable role that the Group plays in putting time and space aside for feminism, and giving time for feminists to work together in a spirit of exchange. The emphasis on temporality, she noted, extends to the latent potential of earlier feminisms that were overlooked, under-valued, or stereotyped when they first emerged

Katherine Taylor: Heavy Weather

This essay considers the work of Atlanta-based artist Katherine Taylor, which returns repeatedly to the devastating hurricanes that have afflicted her hometown of Biloxi, Mississippi. Pointing to Taylor's use of news footage, private photographs and personal memories to come to terms with Hurricane Camille, which devastated her family home when she was a child, the essay highlights the role of recording, remembering and working through in her work. The essay compares earlier paintings by Taylor, which create a sense of stasis in the wake of catastrophe, with recent works that seem to have given up the fight against water and weather. With their smeared and streaked paint, these works convey a terrain vague so encroached upon by the elements that the viewer is unclear what she sees. The emptiness and destruction depicted in these stripped-down works becomes an analogy for the end of painting as much as a preoccupation with civilization’s disappearance

Relationality in Feminist Collective Practice

This conversation explores the feminist art practice of Australian, Berlin-based artist Alex Martinis Roe. Martinis Roe starts by stating her criticism of the solo artists model. Instead, she explains how she has developed a feminist approach to art making that presents and creates a relational model of subjectivity, where subjects come into being through relationships with others. In her art she explores her own feminist formation and the ideas that have shaped her politics. She embraces a relational model of authorship and selfhood, which is appropriate to those feminist ideas, and which contributes to the futures they hope to bring about. She uses the term “network” to describe relationships among “influences,” “artist,” and “audience,” positions that are usually considered separately, as the grounds for a social dialogic space amongst all those who take part. Martinis Roe explains how making visible the genealogies of these relationships and collaborations builds momentum, collecting the transformative force of more actions. Knowledge of what has gone before enables us to inherit the futures they laid the foundations for, which in turn fosters transgenerational solidarity and greater social change, Martinis Roe asserts. Martinis Roe's engagement with Milan Women’s Bookshop is foundational to her transgenerational, "networked" approach. She discusses some of the collective's practices, including Starting from One’s Self, Practice of Relations, and Affidamento (entrustment). The conversation reflections on the collective processes feeding into Martinis Roe’s 2018 film ‘Our Future Network,’ for which Reckitt devised and shared the proposition ‘Productive Refusals.” One of more than twenty feminists propositions developed for the film, the exercise was shaped through process of mutual entrustment and group work designed to catalyse collective politics. Other areas of feminist theory and practice discussed include the value of working through personal experience and difference in constituting and shaping political practice; eroticism in feminist group work; friction, agency and the need for unstructured time in group situations; safer spaces; practices of alliance; commitment; the limits of friendship within Australia’s colonial context; the situated, dialogic and collective nature of theoretical ideas; feminist new materialism; intimate spaces for group work and gathering; public speech; the role of curatorial and institutional support and collaboration; storytelling and virtuality; and the feminist ethos of filming and editing developed in the making of ‘Our Future Network.

Because the Night: Curating One-Off Nocturnal Events

The article focuses on Nuit Blanche, a night-time art event that began in Paris, France, in 2002 and has since spread to other cities in Europe and North America. Highlighting the social aspects of art that is experienced as part a large group, the article considers issues of urban branding, gentrification and the rhetoric of the creative city, populism, civic spectacle, and the attention economy. Discussing the public's participation in performance and artists who have exhibited work at these events, the article considered projects by artists including Jon Sasaki in a zone of Nuit Blanche Toronto curated by Dave Dyment, and Santiago Sierra, Shawna Dempsey and Lori Millan, Iain Baxter&, and Dan Mihaltianu in a zone curated by DisplayCult for Nuit Blanche Toronto. Reckitt also reflected on her own curation of the zone ‘Once More With Feeling’ Toronto’s Nuit Blanche in 2012 (with artists including Trisha Brown Dance Company, Susan Stenger, Maeve Brennan and Ruth Ewan,) and her imminent curation of Flux Night: Free Association, in Atlanta, including the participation of artists including the Open Music Archive, Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky, Deanna Bowen, and Heather Phillipson

Feminist Duration Reading Group

Since March 2015 the Feminist Duration Reading Group has met to consider under-appreciated texts, theories and tactics from outside the Anglo-American feminist canon and to consider the contemporary resonance of earlier moments of feminist thinking, art and activism. The series started in March 2015 with a focus on Italian feminisms. Focusing on texts from the late 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s, the group initially highlighted interlocking strands from Italian feminisms, including: the practice of consciousness-raising, or autocoscienza within Italian feminism; tactics of emotional and professional withdrawal; and the politics of non-assimilation. These meetings informed a two-day research symposium, Feminist Duration in Art and Curating, at Goldsmiths, University of London, later in March 2015. Following Feminist Duration in Art and Curating, the group moved from the academic context of Goldsmiths to the public art studio complex SPACE in Hackney, where it started to meet in August 2015 on a monthly basis. In December 2015, the public events programme ‘Now You Can Go’ took place across four London art spaces, building and reflecting on the explorations that had taken place in the reading group. Events included ‘A Feminist Chorus for Feminist Revolt,’ a spoken distillation of the monthly discussions and readings made by the Feminist Duration Reading Group, and gathered into a score by Lucy Reynolds, which was performed at the “Now You Can Go Seminar’ at The Showroom. http://nowyoucango.tumblr.com/post/133658780340/now-you-can-go-seminar At a public meeting of the group in February 2016, it was decided that sessions would continue at SPACE, and that the group would widen its remit to encompass other under-known feminisms, in addition to those from the Italian tradition. The group also changed the way in which texts were explored in the group, leading to the practice of reading together, out loud, on the night. A sister group in Toronto, developed by art historian and curator Gabrielle Moser following her participation in ‘Now You Can Go,’ was set up in June 2016. An exploratory working group, Emilia-Amalia employs practices of citation, annotation, and autobiography as modes of activating feminist art, writing and research. The two groups collaborate on resources, developing sessions in dialogue response to one another’s work. https://gallery44.org/events/emilia-amalia-working-group Moser and Reckitt discuss their exchange in the published conversation ‘Feminist Tactics of Citation, Annotation, and Translation: Curatorial Reflections on the Now You Can Go Programme,’ (OnCurating, 2016). http://www.on-curating.org/author/tag/Gabrielle%20Moser.html#.WFpCbenn35

Trust and the Artist-Curator Relationship

Brief contribution to September 2018 issue of C Magazine on Trust. The piece responds to the question posed by the editor of how trust wagers into the negotiations required of artists and curators to complete a project? Considering that the artist-curator relationship has become almost required - even co-dependent - in the ways that art is made public, what role does trust play in establishing that relationship? How is the artist's trust different from the curator's trust? What does language have to do with it? How are boundaries maintained between artistic process and curatorial discourse? If the initiation of a project requires a leap of faith from both parties, how is trust built? What tools might one come up with to deal with situations where trust isn’t a given, or where established trust is broken

Not Quite How I Remember It, Catalogue Essay

Written in conjunction with the group exhibition ‘Not Quite How I Remember It’, at The Power Plant, Toronto (7 June - 1 September, 2008), the catalogue essay considers how artists reconstruct events, narratives and cultural artifacts from the recent past. It focuses on works by exhibiting artists Diane Borsato, Gerard Byrne, Nancy Davenport, Felix Gmelin, Sharon Hayes, Mary Kelly, Nestor Kruger, Michael Maranda, Olivia Plender, Walid Raad, Dario Robleto, Michael Stevenson, Kelley Walker, and Lee Walton. Exploring how artists revisit iconic as well as obscure histories, Reckitt shows how these strategies aim to wrest the past from master narratives in order to reveal suppressed or forgotten details, and to propose unexpected connections and speculative futures. She highlights artistic tactics of montage, sampling, remixing, restaging, and reconstruction, noting how they often take surprisingly laborious forms. Discussing how artworks reflect on the complexities of cultural and artistic transmission, influence and inheritance, Reckitt notes how these practices pay tribute to figures and groups who are rarely depicted within official histories. She highlights artists' concern with how radical political and cultural legacies are both bequeathed to and deployed by subsequent generations. Evoking the exhibition's atmosphere of layered time, Reckitt suggests that it sharpens viewers’ awareness of historical place, while prompting questions about how future generations will represent current times