De-/Anti-/Post-colonial Feminisms in Fine Art and Textile Craft:

Organisers:
Professor Katy Deepwell, Dr Neelam Raina and Neda Mohamadi
for Create/Feminisms ACI, Middlesex University
These events are financially supported by ACI Faculty, Middlesex University.

Create/Feminisms is organising 4 online research seminars, to be held on Zoom, June-July 2022 (in the afternoons, GMT)
The 4 seminars are themed:
1. Decolonising Craft (June 14)
2. Feminist Pedagogies: learning to unlearn and decolonial toolkits (June 21)
3. De-/Anti-/Post-colonial Futures in Feminism (June 28)4. Feminist De-/Anti-/Post-colonial Aesthetics (July 5)

This is an open call for poster presentations/text submissions to visual artists, textile practitioners, PhD students, researchers who are art historians, art critics, art curators and art lecturers/Professors to join our online research seminars.

A full list of keynote speakers and seminar panellists will be advertised shortly, but those confirmed include (keynotes) Francoise Verges, Madina Tlostanova, Aarti Kawlra, (panellists) Sahra Taylor, Neelam Raina, Isabelle Massu, Michele Williams Gamaker, Shanna Ketchum Heap o’Birds, Ayanna Dozier, Leslie C. Sotomayor, Renee Mussai, Dalida Maria Benfield.

We want to hear from you, if your work represents an intervention in de-/anti-/post-colonial debates in fine art and textiles in practice or in theory as a contribution to research in this area and will offer a 5 minute presentation about your work or a poster as a 300 word text/image. 1 hour of each seminar will be devoted to the poster presentations from the audience.

We would like to see your statement (300 words max. + 1 image as jpg/tif) outline how your work demonstrates this intervention in these debates in art and craft practices, pedagogy, theory, history or criticism or curatorial projects. If you are involved in feminist art activism in this area, please identify your own contribution within any groups, collectives, campaigns or actions.
Please specify the issues, concepts, theories, ideas or areas of concern you are working with.
Please include your institutional affiliation, and websites, where relevant. Email contacts will not be published.

All contributions sent will be presented in a booklet produced to accompany the 2022 research seminars which will be published online.

Opportunities to present (5 min. poster speeches) will be given to contributors where the themes of their research align to the seminar topics. Each seminar will have its own poster session for interventions from contributors. Please identify which seminar best suits your work.

Please take this opportunity to present a visual art project past or present or a body of practical or theoretical work in fine art/textiles which addresses de-/anti-/post-colonial feminist thought on any subject, media, approach.

Deadline for all contributions: 5 June 2022.

Email to: Neda Mohamadi: NM1287 [] live.mdx.ac.uk

These seminars have been organised with the belief that feminism needs to represent its own pluri-versality as it continues to redefine local/global politics through its alliances and maintain its allegiances to diverse ways of thinking and making. De-/Anti-/Post-Colonial thought contains many different tactics, approaches and spheres of influence in visual arts and textiles. Feminist work in de-/anti-/post-colonial thought has pursued a long-standing critique of the blindspots on gender in configurations of modernity/coloniality; in postcolonial and critical race theory scholarship; in black feminist and anti-racist, anti-homophobic thought; and is evident in black, third-world, global majority, post-Soviet as well as indigeneous histories and movements. These complex interventions redefine feminist intersectionality and queer theory away from their configurations solely in nation-states, area studies or world systems theories, searching for other ways to re-imagine global connections, histories and cultural developments, as well as systems of belonging or referencing, to envisage new forms of planetary visions of space and time, past and present. It is in this spirit of acknowledging and making visible the range of this work that we have organised these seminars.