Rebellion, Resistance, and Resilience: Three Black British Artists and Eco-Feminism

Abstract

This paper critically discusses the work of three women artists of colour who, in different ways, engaged with environmental catastrophe and called for climate justice during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Leslie Hakim-Dowek, Gurminder Sikand, and Nina Edge each engaged in particular types of thoughtful, practice-led decolonial feminism that addressed the consequences of rampant corporate neo-colonialism and the ways that the global North has treated the global South as a site for material extraction and exploitation. Echoing the non-violent systems of protest of the women-led Chipko environmental movement in northern India, Sikand's delicate and gentle paintings may nonetheless be understood as searing eco-feminist statements; Edge's work from 1991 combines image and poetry to address the on-going consequences of the devastating industrial disaster at Bhopal, India, in 1984; while Hakim-Dowek's 1991 series of paintings titled Endangered Species (1991) presents a memorial to what has already been lost. This paper will argue that despite the curatorial and critical neglect experienced by these artists, their work nonetheless offers entryways into current, globally important, conversations about the ongoing struggle of women in the global South against white neo-colonial capitalism, and the fight for climate justice.