Otherwise Engaged
AMIW– Or Rather What Can Words Do?
This presentation will draw upon the history of a feminist artistic project: AMIW and its new endevour that on the one hand attempts to position itself as counter-hegemonic practice and on the other operate from the margins.
All My Independent Women (AMIW), is an artistic project rooted in feminist / gender questions that I initiated in Portugal in 2005. Since then, the proposition has been to make a collective artistic project around the work of artists who create from a feminist perspective or problematize gender. The project was presented five times in Portugal, and established a debate about feminisms and feminist art in Portugal. Now planing its 6th edition at the Association of Women Artist in Vienna (VBKÖ) it intends to question: How can the desire for visibility be transmuted into a different experience of equality and accountability?
More than an exhibition, AMIW is a platform of feminist thought; in this frame we want to take on the revision and proposal of a different position from which to understand AMIW initial desire for visibility and affiliate with a positive reading of ‘marginality’ and (in)visibility. So for the VBKÖ edition AMIW wants to take on different challenges. First, in the heritage of so many other collective projects AMIW wants to attempt the dissolution of the author, thus this edition will not name particular singular artists that might present individual practices, but name all and everyone that has ever been involved in the project, expanding AMIW into a vast network that grows giving account of its paths. Secondly, AMIW has been connected very closely to democracy as a project of conflictual change and in that sense the exhibition project attempts to foster a platform of interaction based on accountability, care and affiliation. Finally AMIW wants to affirm itself as a political platform of new feminist movements.
Leeds, Old Mining Building, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies.