About this Event
Punk, Women, Films with Rachel Garfield
16 April 7-9 pm
Tickets £6, concessions available
Just as punk created a space for bands such as The Slits and Poly Styrene to challenge 1970s norms of femininity through a transgressive, strident new female identity, it also provoked experimental feminist filmmakers to initiate a parallel, lens-based challenge to patriarchal modes of filmmaking.
The films in this screening were part of a rebellious, feminist punk audiovisual culture. In their filmmaking and their performed personae, film and video artists such as Vivienne Dick, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Ruth Novaczek, Anne Robinson, Sarah Turner, and Jill Westwood (all of whom will be screened) offered a powerful, deliberately awkward alternative to hegemonic conformist femininity, creating a new punk audiovisual aesthetic.
While not all of these artists identified as punks, the spirit of punk provoked experimental feminist filmmakers to initiate a parallel, lens-based challenge to patriarchal modes of filmmaking. A vital aspect of our vibrant contemporary digital audiovisual culture can be traced back to the techniques and forms of these pioneers, who, like their musical contemporaries, worked in a pre-digital, analogue modality that nevertheless influenced the emergent digital audiovisual culture of the 1990s and 2000s.
Rachel Garfield is Professor in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art. Garfield exhibits and screens her films regularly (ICA in the London Short Film Festival 2023, Designathon 2023, Zurich, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin and The Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Hatton Gallery, Newcastle; Beaconsfield Gallery Vauxhall, London; Focal Point, London Short Film Festival and Open City Doc Festival and The Babylon Cinema Berlin, Espaciocentre, Tenerife Espacio De Les Artes, CCA Santa Fe, Arizona State University Museum, Aqua Art Fair Miami). Garfield also publishes extensively in journals and anthologies. She is co-editor of the monographs Dwoskino: The Gaze of Stephen Dwoskin (LUX, 2022) and Experimental Filmmaking and Punk: Feminist Audio-Visual Culture of the 1970s and 1980s (Bloomsbury, 2022), and has curated screenings at Metrograph New York (2022); e-flux Screening Room New York (2022), AEMI, Dublin (2022); BFI, London Experimenta (2022,2024); ICA London Short Film Festival (2022); Bristol Experimental Expanded Film (2018); Frankfurtfilmkollectiv (2013).
Image: Sarah Turner, She Wanted Green Lawns 1989. Courtesy of the artist and Cinenova Distribution.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Showroom Gallery, 63 Penfold Street, London, United Kingdom
GBP 6.00
