Viva Brighton Issue #72 February 2019

ART
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Eduardo Gil, Niños Desaparecidos, Segunda Marcha de la resistencia, Buenos Aires (1982), courtesy the artist
Still I Rise
Feminist resistance
“Explain the show in a nutshell,” I ask Rosie
Cooper, sitting in the café of the De La
Warr Pavilion, overlooking the glimmering,
choppy Channel.
She’s Head of Exhibitions there, and she’s
telling me about Still I Rise, on at the elegant
Bexhill arts centre from the 9th of February.
It’s not so easy to summarise.
“It began as an examination of the role
women have played in resistance movements,
and alternative forms of living, since
the nineteenth century,” she says. “It features
100 exhibits from around 40 practitioners,
featuring materials produced by visual artists,
writers, designers and activists.”
So far so simple.
“It’s all developed from a long-term conversation
I’ve been having with my fellow
curator Irene Aristazabal, about feminism
and how to embed inclusive feminist practice
in our respective cultural institutions,”
she continues. Irene is Head of Exhibitions
at Nottingham Contemporary.
A longer explanation follows, because the
exhibits describe intertwining and often
contradictory themes, and the curators –
also including Cédric Fauq of Nottingham
Contemporary – have come at it through
the prism of feminist and queer theory.
The key term, in my understanding, is
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