Zadie Xa, The Conch, Sea Urchin and Brass Bell

Talk

Feminist Futures: moving image practices

Panel discussion

Saturday 10 March 2018 3 - 4.15pm

The Reynolds Room, Burlington House, Royal Academy of Arts, Piccadilly. Enter via the Keeper's House.

£15, £9 concessions.

Priority booking for Friends of the RA opens on Thursday 18 January 2018 at 10am. Booking opens to the public on Friday 19 January at 10am.

Join artists Sutapa Biswas, Jessy Jetpacks and Zadie Xa as they discuss how they use moving image in their art and its potential for structural change, chaired by broadcaster, film-maker and journalist Bidisha.

With a focus on moving image, our panel of artists address the different ways in which artists are able to create structural change through their practice. Dig deeper into the role of language and traditional artistic practice and how they perpetuate structures of power. How can the language of moving image be used to destabilise conventional gender and racial positions in an attempt to reframe the boundaries of society?

By referring to their own practices, our panel explores the capacity of filmmaking, to challenge and rewrite conventional structures and knowledge. Join in as we discuss the significance of moving image in the context of emancipation, political struggle and contemporary feminism.

£15, £9 concessions.

Priority booking for Friends of the RA opens on Thursday 18 January 2018 at 10am. Booking opens to the public on Friday 19 January at 10am.

Speakers

Bidisha is a British journalist, film-maker and broadcaster/presenter for the BBC, Channel 4 and Sky. She specialises in international human rights, social justice, gender and the arts and offers political analysis and cultural diplomacy tying these interests together, usually for the British Council. She also does outreach work in UK prisons, refugee charities and detention centres. She is a trustee of the Booker Prize Foundation, looking after the UK's most prestigious prizes for literature in English and in translation. Her most recent book, her fifth, is Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices of London. Published in March 2015, it's based on her outreach work, most recently with young asylum-seeker mothers. Her poetry has been published by Wasafiri magazine, Seagull Books, Saqi Books, English PEN and Young MWA magazine. She is currently part of the year-long City of Stories writers' residency for London-based writers.

An Impossible Poison, 2016
The Conch, Sea Urchin and Brass Bell, 2017
Through performance, video, painting and textiles, artist Zadie Xa interrogates the overlapping and conflation of cultures that inform self conceptualized identities, notions of self and her experience within the Asian diaspora. Her intricate hand sewn fabric work stitches together familiar symbols of yin-yangs, knives, lucky numbers and monolid eyes, all operating within a system of personalized semiotics. These exaggerated motifs are utilised by Xa to both combat and engage with perceptions of Asian identity and otherness and aspire to create new and alternative Asian identity narratives often fantastical and within the realm of the supernatural.

Zadie Xa was born in Vancouver Canada and currently lives in London UK. She received an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2014 and her BFA at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2007
Birdsong, 2004
Biswas works across different media including painting and drawing, film, digital video, performance and photography. Her art engages with questions of identity, race and gender in relation to time, space and history. Her works are inspired by oral histories, literature and art history. She is particularly interested in the ways in which larger historical narratives collide with personal narratives. Biswas’ works have been widely reviewed and are held in numerous collections including: TATE Collections, Arts Council England, Sheffield Museums and Art Galleries, APT New York, Reed College (USA). She is currently in dialogue with a number of international institutions regarding a range of different forthcoming projects.

Sutapa Biswas has taught Fine Art with Art History at undergraduate and postgraduate level (including MPhil and PhD supervision) for over 30 years. She was the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at Yale Center For British Art (in conjunction with Yale University) USA, and a recipient of a National Endowment for The Arts Award (USA). She has lectured widely internationally including for: the Whitney Programme, New York; Stanford University; New York University; Mills College, USA; University of British Columbia; Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University. Most recently, Biswas was a Reader, Chelsea College of Art and Design, CCW, UAL (2006-2012) and where, in total, she taught for over 23 years
Jessy Jetpacks (b. 1987 Dubai, UAE) previously studied art at Winchester School of Art.

A maximalist in referencing and emotional registers, Jetpacks works across many mediums, most recently focusing on video, digital works, virtual reality, music, and 3D printing. Her work is poignant, provocative and engaging, with a dark sense of humour and a sometime belligerent vulnerability. Themes and interests range from the global political to the fundamental and private human condition – advocacy, poetry, and philosophy all finding their place.

Subverting polemical binaries, Jetpacks explores these themes with sensitivity, finding humour and intrigue within the ouroboros-like metastructures, never wholly consistent or complete, which underpin any narrative of reality. Consistently challenging and forward-thinking, Jetpack’s parodies of popular/internet culture and the modern relationships forged within it are always accessible and always evocative.

In 2017 Jetpacks collaborated with HTC Vive on Virtually Real, creating works of art in virtual reality that, in a world-first, were then brought to life through 3D printing.

International Women's Day 2018 events

To mark International Women’s Day 2018, we're presenting a week-long series of events that explore ideas of feminist futures through art and architecture. Join us as we investigate the power of art practice as a catalyst for social change. Focusing on women artists engaged in a variety of media, we'll dissect ideas of automation in architecture, moving image as language, archiving and alternative artistic platforms. Celebrate the RA’s 250th anniversary with us and see what we can draw from the past as a way into the future. Enjoy panels, lectures and roundtables as our speakers contemplate multiple feminist possibilities.

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