@ Institute of Contemporary Arts (
ICA), The Mall, London (Cinema)
3-6pm, Wed 18th March 2015
Keynote Speaker: Deanna Petherbridge, artist and curator of Witches and Wicked Bodies
Respondents: Lynne Segal, Alexandra Kokoli and Katy Deepwell.
Deanna Petherbridge, Witches and Wicked Bodies, NGS Publishing
Deanna Petherbridge’s exhibition, Witches and Wicked Bodies
(British Museum, 5 Sept 2014-11 Jan 2015 and Scottish National Gallery
of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 27th July - 3rd Nov 2013), provided an
intriguing and original historical overview of representations of
witches from classical representations on Graeco/Roman pottery through
to Symbolist works at the turn of the twentieth century.
This ICA/Middlesex University mini-conference
aims to discuss this exhibition’s presentation of misogyny through the
persistence of extremely potent and disturbing images of hideous old
hags and desirable young sirens, as it has been revisited, restructured
and represented throughout different periods of Western art history. The
respondents will then introduce questions about the representation of
older women in art, culture and society in the past and present and look
at how different approaches within feminism have taken the figure of
the witch and attempted to transform it.
Lynne Segal is Professor in Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London. Her recent books include: Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils Ageing (Verso, 2013); Making Trouble: Life and Politics (Serpents Tail, 2007); Straight Sex: The Politics of Pleasure
(Virago, 1994; Verso, 2014). She will address the exhibition and its
topic from the perspective of her extensive research into gender,
sexualities and shifts and continuities in portrayals of ageing.
Alexandra Kokoli, Senior Lecturer in Visual
Culture (Fine Art), Middlesex University, is completing a monograph on
the feminist uncanny, (Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming). Her talk will
examine the figure of the witch in 1970s French feminisms informed by
psychoanalysis, including Catherine Clément's contribution to The Newly Born Woman (co-authored with Hélène Cixous) and the bimonthly journal Sorcières
(1976-1981). In psychoanalytic second-wave feminist discourse, the
witch emerges as victim and heroine in one, bearing the marks of the
most extreme misogynistic violence yet also embodying the potential for a
feminist revolution.
Katy Deepwell is Professor of Contemporary Art, Theory and Criticism, Middlesex University, and editor of n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal and Feminist Art Manifestos: An Anthology
(KT press, 2014). In her talk, she will address how feminist thought
and research, notably Mathilda Joselyn Gage, Mary Daly and Silvia
Federici, has analysed the witchcraze and how this emerges as a means to
reconceptualise the question of heresies, cosmology, and relations of
church and state for feminism, while at the same time providing potent
imagery for feminist art works.
The event will be chaired by Professor Hilary Robinson, Dean of the School of Art and Design, editor of the anthology Feminism-Art-Theory 1968-2014 (Wiley-Blackwell, second edition, forthcoming 2015).
This talk is organized by Create/Feminisms, a
research cluster in the School of Art and Design, Middlesex University
and is a collaboration between the School of Art and Design and the ICA.
Tickets available to the public: £8 full price/£5 concessions/£3 ICA members.
