Lucy Reynolds (editor) - Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image: Contexts and Practices

a crumpled heap, history at my feet, not stretched above my head.

Lis Rhodes, Whose History? 1979

Basma Alsharif is an artist and film-maker born in Kuwait of Palestinian origin. Basma was raised between France, the US and the Gaza Strip. She has a BFA and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She works between cinema and installation, with an interest in the human condition in relation to shifting geopolitical landscapes and natural environments. Major exhibitions include: the Whitney Biennial, Les Rencontres dArles, Les Modules at the Palais de Tokyo, Here and Elsewhere at the New Museum, Al Riwaq Biennale Palestine, the Berlin Documentary Forum, the Sharjah Biennial and Manifesta 8. She received a jury prize at the Sharjah Biennial 9 and was shortlisted for the Abraaj Prize 2018.

Lucia Aspesi is an independent film curator and assistant curator at Pirelli HangarBicocca (Milan). From 2010 to 2012 she was a researcher on the Document et art contemporain post-diplome programme at ESI (cole europenne suprieure de limage), studying the history of Italian expanded cinema. She co-curated with Iolanda Ratti a monographic show on Marinella Pirelli at Museo del Novecento (Milan). Lucia has presented film programmes in different institutions, including ICA (The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London); Xcntric CCCB (Centre de Cultura Contempornia de Barcelona); La Triennale di Milano; Centre Georges Pompidou and La Fmis in Paris. She is a contributor to Mousse Magazine.

Erika Balsom is a senior lecturer in film studies at Kings College London. She is the author of After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (Columbia University Press, 2017) and Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (Amsterdam University Press, 2013), as well as the co-editor of Documentary Across Disciplines (MIT Press, 2016). Her writing has appeared in publications such as Grey Room, Artforum, Frieze, e-flux journal, Cinema Journal and Screen.

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz have been working together in Berlin since 2007. Their staged films and film installations often start with a song, a picture, a film or a script from the past. They produce performances for the camera, staging the actions of individuals and groups living indeed thriving in defiance of normality, law and economics. Their films upset normative historical narratives, as figures across time are staged, projected and layered. Their performers are choreographers, artists and musicians, with whom they are having a long-term conversation about performance, the meaning of visibility since early modernity, the pathologization of bodies, but also about glamour and resistance.

Elinor Cleghorn is a writer and researcher specializing in womens experimental film-making and its history. She received her PhD from Birkbeck, University of London, with a thesis exploring the relationship between dance and embodied film-making practices in the work of Lotte Reiniger, Loie Fuller and Maya Deren. In 2011, Cleghorn programmed Maya Deren: 50 Years On at BFI Southbank, a season of talks, events and screenings commemorating the fifty-year anniversary of Derens death. She has been a regular contributor to the BFIs education programme, and has given talks and lectures on film feminism and early experimental film histories at venues including Tate Modern, ICA London, Camden Arts Centre, Nottingham Contemporary and the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. Cleghorns writing has appeared in journals and websites including Screen, The Moving Image Review and Art Journal, Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema and Lux Online. She lives and works in Sussex.

Maeve Connolly co-directs the MA in Art & Research Collaboration (ARC) at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Dublin. She is the author of TV Museum: Contemporary Art and the Age of Television (Intellect, 2014), on television as a cultural form, an object of critique and a site of artistic intervention, and The Place of Artists Cinema: Space, Site and Screen (Intellect, 2009), on the cinematic turn in contemporary art. Recent publications include contributions to the anthologies European Womens Video Art (John Libbey Publishing, 2019), Expanding Cinema: Theorizing Film Through Contemporary Art (Amsterdam University Press, 2019), Workshop of the Film Form (Fundacja Arton and Sternberg Press, 2017) and Exhibiting the Moving Image: History Revisited (JRP Ringier, 2015). Maeve serves on the advisory boards of aemi, PLASTIK Festival, and the journals Alphaville and MIRAJ. Her current research focuses on artists as agents and analysts of infrastructural change.

Maria Palacios Cruz is a film curator based in London and the co-founder of The Visible Press. She has curated retrospectives of Ute Aurand, Luke Fowler, Robert Beavers, Morgan Fisher and Ken Jacobs, and worked closely with artists including Laida Lertxundi, Beatrice Gibson, Ana Vaz, Basma Alsharif, Mary Helena Clark, Alia Syed, Kathryn Elkin, Jean-Paul Kelly and Lis Rhodes to present their work in the form of screenings, exhibitions, publications and other events. She is deputy director at LUX, the UK agency for artists moving image.

Catherine Elwes is a video artist and curator, and was active in the feminist art movement in the late 1970s. She co-curated the exhibitions Womens Images of Men and About Time at the ICA in 1980, and was the director of the biennial UK/Canadian Film & Video Exchange (1998 to 2006) and co-curator of Figuring Landscapes (2008 to 2010), an international screening exhibition on themes of landscape. Elwes has written extensively about feminist art, performance, installation, landscape and the moving image and is author of Video Loupe (K.T. Press, 2000), Video Art: A Guided Tour (I.B. Tauris, 2005), Installation and the Moving Image (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2015) and is currently writing Landscape and the Moving Image (Wallflower/CUP). Catherine is Founding Editor of MIRAJ (Intellect Books) and has published in numerous books, journals, exhibition catalogues and periodicals including Art Monthly, Third Text, MIRAJ, the Millennium Film Journal, Time Out, Independent Media, Performance Magazine, Variant, Filmwaves (of which she was an editor), Vertigo and Contemporary Magazine. Catherine retired as Professor of Moving Image Art at Chelsea College of Arts in November 2017.

Rachel Garfield is an artist engaged in the role of lived relations in the formation of subjectivity. Her recent films, of the trilogy The Struggle have shown in the Hatton Gallery Newcastle, The Nunnery and Beaconsfield London, The London Short Film Festival and Open City Film Festival. In addition to her art, Rachels published writing includes the chapters Between Seeing and Knowing: Stephen Dwoskins Behindert and the Cameras Caress, eds. Laura Mulvey, Sue Clayton; Anwar Shemza: Negotiating the British Landscape, ed. Iftikhar Dadi, (2015); A Particular Incoherence: Some Works of Vivienne Dick, ed. Treasa OBrian, (2009), Ali G: Just Who Does He Think He Is (2001). Rachel is currently preparing for the book AV