FEMINIST ART ACTIVISMS AND ARTIVISMS edited by Katy Deepwell examines different art practices through discussions on identity, gender, power structures and politics and contributes to dialogues between feminist thought and activism in relation to visual arts
On 1st July 2018 BBC FOUR broadcasts the first programme in a documentary series celebrating the 70th anniversary of the NHS. It focuses on people’s memories of the health service, and include an interview with Loraine Leeson. It also features the posters on health issues she produced with Peter Dunn in the 1970s. Some of these were in support of the campaign to keep Bethnal Green Hospital open, while others were produced with members of health workers’ unions for East London Health Project to warn people about the impending cuts to services at that time – one of these posters celebrated 30th anniversary of the NHS. A retrospective exhibition of this work was held at the ICA in May 2017.
On 9th August 2017 the London Community Video Archive went live. Its aim is to preserve, archive and share community videos made in the 1970s/80s in London Portable video recording — now a technology routinely embodied in smartphones — became available for the very first time back in the early 1970s, making it possible for individuals and communities to make their own television. The medium was taken up by people ignored or under-represented in the mainstream media – tenants on housing estates, community action groups, women, black and minority ethnic groups, youth, gay and lesbian people, and the disabled. With an overriding commitment to social empowerment and to combating exclusion, ‘Community Video’ dealt with issues which still have a contemporary resonance — housing, play-space, discrimination, youth arts.
The archive contains the video Emergency created by Loraine Leeson and Peter Dunn in 1974 in support of the campaign to keep Bethnal Green Hospital open. It also hosts an interview with Loraine that outlines how the making of this video became an important touchstone for her subsequent socially engaged art practice.
The visual arts organisation The Art of Change developed out of the Docklands Community Poster Project, from which it learned key lessons. Importantly it built on methods of engagement giving voice to those with first-hand knowledge of issues, and a pro-active approach to creating alternatives rather than relying on protest in its cultural activism.
A project with teenage Bengali girls from Bow, East London exploring the theme of their experience of living in two cultures, resulting in a 16 x 12ft (4.8 x 3.6m) photo-mural and touring exhibition.
Digital montage displayed as a 16 x 12ft (4.8 x 3.6m) photomural. Produced with pupils from George Green’s School in East London. Working with a group of culturally mixed teenagers, the project dealt with issues of culture and identity, commonality and difference in an inner city area fraught with racial tension.
Four-projector tape-slide production and exhibition co-authored by Loraine Leeson and Karen Merkel that explores the importance of culture in the lives of five women from diverse backgrounds. The artists worked through the Women Against Fundamentalism group in London to reach women who had suffered under fundamentalism in their family lives.
Awakenings, after Stanley Spencer’s Resurrection was a Tate Gallery commission exhibited at the Millbank site from 1995-96. Digital montage produced with pupils from George Green’s School in East London, displayed as a 14ft x 7.5ft (4.3m x 2.3m) cibachrome print.
Alpona panels and beadwork hangings created with women and children from East London’s Bengali community, combining traditional skills with digital processes. The panels inspired design of the Jagonari Asian Women’s Centre cafe, where they were put on permanent display. Collaboration with Language 2000.
