Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts

About the Author

Basia Sliwinska is an art historian and theorist working as a Research Fellow at the NOVA University Lisbon in Portugal.

Catherine Dormor is a practising artist, Reader in Textile Practices and Head of Research Programmes and at the Royal College of Art, UK.

Product Description

Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts interrogates the politics of space expressed via womxn's artistic practices, which prioritise solidarity and collaboration across borders, imagining attentive geographies of difference. It considers belonging as a manifestation of processes of becoming that traverse borders and generate new spaces and forms of difference. In doing so, the book aims to catalyse mutual social relations founded upon responsibility and response-ability to each other. The transnational framework activates concerns around belonging at a time of intensified divisions, partitioning global narratives, unequal trajectories and increasing violence against bodies of the most vulnerable, largely founded on Eurocentric paradigms of political, economic and cultural superiority.

The contributors engage in a conversation signalling transversal thinking and artmaking in order to articulate and activate 'in-between' spaces. This is to welcome co-affective models of belonging that question versatile embodiments of subjectivity as both agentic and as interrelational. Organised around the triangulation of modes of belonging: spatial, affective and collective, overarched by a transnational lens that acknowledges non-hierarchical, local and socially relevant genealogies against universalising politics of globalisation, these essays consider afresh ways in which female agency disrupts borders and activates concerns around different forms of belonging, citizenship and transnationalisms.

Cover Image credit: Keren Anavy, Garden of Living Images (2018), general installation view (detail). Courtesy of the artist and Wave Hill. Photographer: Stefan Hagen

Review

“This is an impressive collection of essays that addresses, through a feminist lens, important and timely issues. Examining various genres of art from across the globe, and representing diverse topics, Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts is an important contribution to the existing literature on feminist art practice.” ―Maria Photiou, Art Historian and Research Fellow, University of Derby, UK

“One of the urgent issues of our day remains the European invention of the nation state. Combined with issues of climate and poverty, crossing national borders and belonging as a citizen are matters of life itself. This book responds to this conjuncture of crises and its need for an actively intersectional understanding of consequent manifestations of art and gender. Grounded in extensive feminist thinking, focused on particular exemplars of artists and artworks, and structured around "three modes of belonging: spatial, affective, and collective", it promises to be an essential contribution to the discussion as it unfolds in the contemporary art world.” ―Hilary Robinson, Professor of Feminism, Art, and Theory, Loughborough University, UK

“Connecting global artists to multiple conversations about economics, gender and politics, this volume will be an invaluable guide for readers interested in the responses by contemporary feminist artists to myriad capitalist, patriarchial and imperial structures – a must read on this topic.” ―Anne Swartz, Professor of Art History, Savannah College of Art and Design, USA

“Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts encapsulates the breadth and the beauty, as well as the critical challenge, of art that makes worlds in the margins, along the edges and through the charged spaces of the in-between.

Never reducing the wonderfully diverse particularities of the transnational case studies brought together in the volume, Dormor and Sliwinska manage the complex task of creating a dialogue between them with care-filled atte