Feminist Art Research Articles

From meme-making trolls to feminist artists: digital feminist art activism in contemporary South Korea

ABSTRACT This article explores the activism of Silent Megaphone, a Korean feminist artist group. By examining the experiences of Silent Megaphone members, their artworks, and exhibitions, this study argues that the sexist regulations of online platforms drove the meme-producers to enter the realm of feminist art, transforming them from anonymous women to feminist artists with authorship. This transition allowed them to rearrange the aims and styles of their activism, appropriate the practices of online and offline realms, and connect with the broader feminist artist community, establishing a network encompassing both their online feminist group and an unexpected cohort of feminist artists spanning generations, and creating a safe space for their fellow feminists.

“Shade Never Made Anybody Less Gay”: Taylor Swift’s Performance of Allyship and the Neoliberalization of Activism

ABSTRACT With the release of the singles “You Need to Calm Down” and “The Man” in 2019 and 2020, singer-songwriter Taylor Swift positioned herself as an ally to the LGBTQ+ community and a feminist artist. Swift’s longstanding pursuit of authenticity manifested as an attempt to be taken seriously as a political actor. “You Need to Calm Down” equates Swift’s own position as a controversial celebrity with structural homophobia while “The Man” is a neoliberal feminist manifesto that foregrounds dominance as feminist progress without examination of class- and race-based oppression. These examples illustrate the limitations of celebrity activism and allyship and the commodification of activism.

(Nip)ulations: The Nipulator Electronic Bra and the Embodiment of the Image Processing Tool

Abstract The Nipulator electronic bra is a custom-built, wearable device that uses hardware potentiometers (or knobs), a hacked DJ Hero microcontroller, and Cycling ’74 Max/MSP/Jitter software patches to (nip)ulate the author’s voice and/or image in real-time. The bra functions both as an instrument for live video and sound processing as well as feminist art object, and has been featured in several single-channel videos, and performances for an audience. This essay discusses how the author’s work with rare and historically significant image and sound processing tools like the Sandin Image Processor, Jones Frame Buffer, and Paik/Abe Raster Manipulation Unit (aka “Wobbulator”), influenced the creation of The Nipulator, as well as her experimental media art practice more generally. Other artistic, feminist, and personal influences are also considered, and a thorough description of the bra’s design, technical evolution, and challenges with regards to durability is provided.

“The Sun Doesn’t Shine Like in ’85”

Abstract The legacy of Yugoslav music re-emerged in Serbia and in the wider post-Yugoslav cultural space during the 2000s, as the historical distance and growing dissatisfaction with capitalism led artists to reach out to the Yugoslav socialist past. This has taken many directions, from the reigniting of fandom of ex-Yugoslav music stars and the creation of tribute bands, to the renewal of interest in songs from World War ii and the composition of new music echoing Yugoslav memories and re-framing Yugoslav popular songs in the broader field of contemporary artistic practices. Most socio-musical formations and cultural scenes that have been fashioned after the break of Yugoslavia either rearticulated and incorporated particular sound legacies strongly associated with Yugoslav socialism or emulated its ‘ethos’ by contrasting the present with ideas and practices of Socialist Yugoslav society. The author will focus on female performers and authors, as well on the smaller socio-musical and artistic contexts related to the feminist movement. By acknowledging, comparing and interpreting the contributions of female and feminist artists / activists in Serbia who use music as a tools for social critique, the article offers an insight into a complex intersection between gender, ideology, and politics of remembrance ‘after Yugoslavia’.

The Body and the Gallery: Cross Exhibition Review of Sarah Lucas: HAPPY GAS, Women in Revolt!, and If Not Now, When?

From autumn 2023 to spring 2024, several of London's galleries showcased the works of contemporary women artists, including Sarah Lucas and Helen Chadwick. This review critically examines three key exhibitions: Women in Revolt! and Sarah Lucas: HAPPY GAS at Tate Britain, and If Not Now, When? at Saatchi Gallery’s Season on Sculpture. As the exhibitions highlight themes of identity, resilience, and empowerment, particularly focusing on the female body as a powerful medium of expression, this review explores how women artists utilise the female body in contemporary art as a form of resistance against traditionally repressive, male-dominated art practices. The female body, a common feature in feminist art, is often used as a symbol of rebellion, with artists asserting control and autonomy over their bodies through their work. By occupying these contemporary art spaces, these artists affirm their positions within both the public sphere and the broader art discourse. This cross-exhibition review delves into the current renaissance of the gallery space as a site of resistance, examining its contributions to wider feminist discourses and art practices.

No such thing as the female eye: ditching gender-binary categories in art perception

ABSTRACT We still know little about whether and how gender informs, shapes, or influences art perception. This multidisciplinary article investigates the role that gender might play in the perception of art through historical analyses and an eye-tracking experiment. We first traced how gender identity, sexual identity, and sexual orientation have been used to theorize the existence of a gender-binary difference between viewers in traditional aesthetics and feminist art theory. To test whether such claims reflect any measurable experience, we collected eye-tracking data from 84 participants and divided them into two groups of cisgender, heterosexual individuals by self-definition. Each group participated in two experiments; the first showed digital reproductions of mixed artworks, varying in subject, style, form, and size; the second showed artworks with only one figure, either explicitly showing sex-linked traits or not. In both cases, we measured the number of fixations, average fixation duration, and saccade amplitude as well as differences in the location of fixations and entropy. Our analysis did not detect any significant difference between the groups. This proves empirically, for the first time, that in spite of having been often reiterated in history, gender binary categories are not suitable for describing the visual perception of art.

Expanding the Boundaries of Feminist Understanding of Art in the Posthumanist Era: Art and Care

In this article, the characteristics that make a work of art feminist in the posthumanist period will be analysed through artworks in which artists show a specific ort his both the materials of their medium and non-human living and non-living things. In addition, a discussion will be carried out about the fact that when the medium and the material become the work itself in a way that reveals different content and expression potentials, it can be characterised as feminist. This discussion will be addressed through the complex relationship between instrumental reason, which can be defined as the determination of the most effective and efficient means to sustain one’s life and for the benefit of one's material interests, and the concept of patriarchy, which expresses the domination of men over women in the axis of education, employment, domestic labour, wages and care. For this reason, firstly, the positions in feminist art debates, then the conditions of attribution of care to women and the struggles initiated against this, and finally the place of artworks that are shaped within the framework of feminism, care and notions of imagination and that are interested in revealing the autonomy of the material in posthumanism discussions will be explained.

Integrating NFTs into Feminist Art Practices: Actualizing the Disruptive Potential of Decentralized Technology

The integration of NFT technology into the art market utilizes a two-pronged approach of decentralization and increased accessibility as an equalizing answer to rectify gender discrepancies in the contemporary art world. This is not the first time that technology as an art medium has been used as a feminist tool to disrupt the previously established status quo. Through the exploration of the 1990’s Cyberfeminist Net Art Movement, this article will discuss how female-identifying artists employ technological characteristics such as anonymity and online gender masquerading to answer the exclusionary issues affecting their art practices. Furthermore, it will examine how NFTs work to build upon the previously established revolutionary movement of the 1990s to evolve the contemporary art practices of feminist artists. Additionally, this article will address the impacts of this new digital landscape, where anonymity is preferred and algorithmic ordering is non-existent, as a more pragmatic way of creating, selling, and buying art. Finally, this article will examine how the integration of blockchain technology—entirely machine-operated and free from human manipulation—aims to eliminate the human biases of identifying factors such as gender that can be concealed or fabricated when operating in an online sphere.

Exhibitions (1993-2000) of the Feminist Artist Group 30 Carat

Exhibitions (1993-2000) of the Feminist Artist Group 30 Carat

A Study of Floral Images in Chinese-Western Feminist Art Creation

Both in the West and the East, for a long time, the plant “flower” has always been favored by various artists and poets as a metaphor for women, but mostly in a male-dominated society, the relationship between women and flowers was interpreted with a male vision, until the late 1960s, when the rise of feminist art and the awakening of feminist artists brought more attention to the fact that women's perceptions, emotions, and representations of the world were vastly different from those of men. Feminist artists have a strong sense of self, and their individuality often leaves a deep mark on their works. This mark is given a special conceptual language through the imitation of nature and is projected in the formal expression of their works, which becomes the unique style of each artist. Through these floral images, we can discover the artist's style and thus the personality, as well as certain social phenomena, psychological perceptions, and value orientations that characterize the times under the personality level. This article will compare and analyze the different artistic expressions of flowers by feminist artists in the two places, as well as the artworks of the author's perception of flowers.

Performance and Feminist Collectivizing

On November 23, 2022, three original core members of the all‐woman art collective DISBAND—Ilona Granet, Donna Henes, and Martha Wilson—sat down to discuss the therapeutic effects of collaborative performance, the role of comedy in addressing traumatic topics, and the activist potential of feminist collectivizing. Between 1978 and 1982, DISBAND performed in a diverse cultural circuit in downtown New York City where the burgeoning performance art, no wave, and feminist art scenes collided. The multidisciplinary backgrounds of the women in DISBAND matched the hybridity of this cultural circuit; other members included Barbara Kruger, Ingrid Sischy (former editor in chief of Artforum), Diane Torr (performance artist, drag king, and gender activist), Barbara Ess (photographer and member of the no wave band Y Pants), and Daile Kaplan (photographer and drummer of The Gynecologists). The women of DISBAND approached the song format fluidly, combining hymn, anthem, cheer, and protest movement (stomping, chanting, clapping) with rapid‐fire improvisation. DISBAND's songs reflected the members’ personal and collective political concerns, often focusing directly on female oppression. The women's use of costumes, role‐playing, and DIY instruments brought levity and playfulness to what they describe as an apocalyptic moment.

Crafting Disability: Re-envisioning Indian Textile Traditions

This article examines the work of two contemporary feminist disabled artists who are originally from India, and who currently live and work in the United States. Bhavna Mehta and Sugandha Gupta both work in textiles, and identify as women with disabilities. Mehta embroiders X-rays of her own body that capture her medical condition as someone with polio and who uses a wheelchair, where she uses embroidery skills passed down to her by female family members in India. Mehta rescripts the medical narratives of her condition so that her disability is accorded a literal and metaphorical personal touch, antithetical to the often-dehumanizing imagery that pervades within the medical industrial complex. Gupta, who was born with albinism, which also impacted her vision at birth, uses felt and other materials inspired by craft research in India to create sensorial fabrics that disrupt the hierarchy of the senses, with an emphasis on the generative tactile properties of objects. By analyzing the work of these two artists, I not only aim to introduce underrepresented feminist art histories, expanding the literature of the Global South, but I also wish to offer an argument that these artists are crafting new feminist forms of disability and re-envisioning Indian textile traditions.

Honoring the Ancestors and Creator

Abstract Contemporary feminist scholars problematize the difficulties of creating meaningful political alliances between Indigenous and diasporic communities in settler states such as Canada and the United States. This essay uses a relational framework to trace how two feminist artists, one Indigenous and one diasporic, creatively resist the ongoing and uneven conditions of settler colonial capitalism. The essay examines artwork by Tannis Nielsen, a midcareer Indigenous artist with Métis, Anishnawbe, and Danish ancestry, and Rosa Sungjoo Park, an emerging diasporic Korean artist with landed status in Canada. Taken together, the artists’ works offer fruitful opportunities to think through difficult questions about power, history, and representation on Turtle Island. Both Nielsen and Park engage “pedagogies of the Sacred” to honor ancestral traditions and spiritual practices while disrupting binary narratives of tradition vs. modernity. I contend that their creative use of digital media draws on lived experience, embodied knowledge, and spirituality to refuse colonialism’s hyper-individualism and imagine alternative worlds.

Garden of Future Blackness: A terraform artwork

This photo essay documents the making of the Garden of Future Blackness, a sankofa-shaped garden and land-based community artwork that promotes a future where Blackness will be inherently valuable, cherished, and nurtured. Started in the summer of 2020 on the 64-acre site of FAR (Feminist Artist Residency), the Garden became the site of one of three outdoor performances that closed the weeklong Witch Institute symposium in August 2021.

Jewish “Ghosts”: Judit Hersko and Susan Hiller and the Feminist Intersectional Art of Post-Holocaust Memory

This article delves into the underexplored intersection of Jewish identities and feminist art. It critically examines artworks by Judit Hersko and Susan Hiller, aligning with evolving identity constructs in contemporary aesthetics. Concepts like “postmemory” link second-generation Jewish artists to past experiences and unveil the erasure of Jewish women’s memory of Jewish genocide. Analyzing Hersko and Hiller’s diverse works, from landscape photography and sculpture to performance art, it underscores their shared pursuit: illuminating lingering “ghosts” of the Holocaust in modern landscapes. Susan Hiller’s The J Street Project represents an ongoing exploration of loss and trauma beyond the Holocaust in Germany, using archives as a dynamic, evolving phenomenon. Judit Hersko’s art calls for bearing witness to a potential climate catastrophe in Antarctica. The article culminates in the exploration of “The Memorial” (2017), an art project by the activist collective Center for Political Beauty that focuses on the resurgence of overt anti-Semitism in Germany. In essence, Hiller and Hersko confront erasures in history and nature, emphasizing justice and repair. Their art, intertwined with a project addressing contemporary anti-Semitism, serves as a testament to the enduring power of feminist art, reflecting, mourning, and transforming a world marked by historical traumas and war.

The Wheel of Women: Global Female Artists Expound Lifecycle Themes through 'Calendar'

Since the emergence of the second wave of feminism in the late 1960s, feminist scholars have significantly influenced the study of visual culture, while female artists have made notable strides in exploring form, subject matter, and avant-garde expression. This paper examines the utilization of the "Calendar" motif by several feminist artists as a symbol representing the passage of time. Through this visual language, these artists convey themes intricately linked to the female experience, such as growth, change, maturity, and aging. Their transformative approach extends beyond mere subjects and artistic techniques to encompass a unique perspective characterized by the liberation from external viewpoints and the male-dominated gaze, redirecting attention to the inner world of women. In doing so, female artists offer a nuanced and profound exploration of humanity, emotions, and life experiences, transcending simplistic gender labels and feminist advocacy. The paper explres the evolution of Calendar paintings, shedding light on their depiction of historical and aesthetic shifts in Chinese society. Serving as a hallmark of its era, the Calendar not only chronicles the progression of national capitalism but also mirrors the cultural metamorphosis of old China. Furthermore, the paper explores contemporary female artists' engagement with cyclical themes, illustrating how they navigate the life cycle, natural rhythms, and women's experiences across diverse mediums. Finally, the author's photographic creation is discussed, offering reflections on Chinese women's pursuit of autonomy amidst the interplay of tradition and modernity.

«Lay it into the open wounds». Art at war in Maria Kulikovska’s performative sculpture

The paper addresses the work of Ukrainian artist Maria Kulikovska, who resorts to military equipment as artistic materials and to destruction as an artistic method. In the first section, I contextualize Kulikovska’s performative sculpture within art history, claiming that it can be regarded as Destruction Art. In the second section, I turn to Catherine Malabou’s concept of “destructive plasticity” as a philosophical tool of an aesthetics of war, which offers a sound theoretical framework to further understand the implications of Kulikovska’s artistic activity. In the third section, I focus on the main material adopted by Kulikovska, ballistic soap, showing how the artist materially deconstructs inherited dichotomies that keep informing our understanding of wars. By considering the artistic practice of a feminist artist (M. Kulikovska) through the lens of feminist scholarship (K. Stiles, C. Malabou, J. Butler), the paper investigates the relations between war and the arts from a situated perspective.

I'd rather be a cyborg than a celebrity: Black feminism in the digital music industry

This essay argues that Black feminist artists in the digital music industry embrace cyborg politics to disrupt celebrity conventions in ways that draw attention to the complexity of identity and oppression. I draw attention to Black feminism as a movement for challenging intersecting oppressions, particularly for Black women, as well as a drive to celebrate Black women's contributions to the music industry. Donna Haraway's conceptualization of the “cyborg” can offer significant insight into how artists in the digital music industry transcend boundaries of identity to renegotiate the ideas of celebrity and fame. The cyborg is a fluid being that embraces the interconnectedness and interplay between technology and the body. By embracing cyborg politics, those who occupy space in the music industry and online can resist the commodification of their bodies to machinery alone and retain their humanity in the celebrity machine.

Am I really the only one dancing? Seeking solidarity in wit(h)ness

ABSTRACT This performative paper interweaves contextual and theoretical discourse alongside the poetic, reflective text, to capture what Gherardi et al describe as the ‘sociomaterial traces’ of a practice of self-choreography in and through time. Emerging from/through my experience of the choreographic methodologies of solo female dance makers (Rosalind Crisp, Amy Voris, and Deborah Black/Mary Overlie), self-choreography is conceived as neither singular nor isolated, but as a deeply embedded and relational practice. Referencing the writing of feminist artist and psychoanalytical theorist Bracha Ettinger, this article re-frames the performance encounter as one of bi-directional ‘wit(h)nessing’ across a shared ‘Borderspace’, foregrounding solidarity between/with performer and audience. The resulting wit(h)ness scores invite both performer and audience-as-witness to remain open to each other’s affective resonances in what Ettinger describes as a ‘co-poietic’ encounter-event, bringing about ‘differentiation in co-emergence’, solidarity and wonder. As Ettinger states, ‘It’s not about perception. It’s about connecting’. In this shared borderspace, am I really the only one dancing?

Feminist Museology Applied to the Leipzig Museum of Arts (The MdbK)

In this article, I explore how museums navigate the contradictions between contemporary discourses and the presence of colonial European art. Museums as sites of education and collection of items have been approached critically by various feminist artists and activists in recent decades. And in response, museums have begun to hold exhibitions that embrace feminist narratives. Therefore, I connect these peculiarities at a museum in former East Germany and its attempt to appeal to these discussions. For my case study I have chosen das Museum der bildenden Künste (further shortened to the MdbK) in Leipzig. I explore how local and global agendas play out in current exhibitions, how and by whom feminist frameworks are applied to its collection, and what dynamics can be seen in its permanent and temporary exhibition projects. For the purposes of the “Connecting Eastern Europe and Latin America” project, I focus on the exhibition entitled Olga Costa: Dialogues with Mexican Modernism that took place at the MdbK from 1 December 2022 to 26 March 2023. I ask the following questions: Do these temporary projects educate the museum’s team and challenge the narratives that are being told through the permanent exhibitions and publications? Do those temporary exhibitions transform the museum’s general narrative? I turn to how large exhibitions, which are curated by the core museum’s team, present gender, race, (in)justice, German nationalism, and equality.