feminism
Women War Artists, Imperial War Museum, LondonTuesday, 23 August 2011
The sturdy, healthy, almost glowing attractiveness of Ruby Loftus, her reddish curls partly tamed by a green hair net, her face punctuated by bright-red lipstick characteristic of the 1940s, her blue overall neatly complementing her red shirt, and... Read more... |
Top Girls, Minerva Theatre ChichesterThursday, 30 June 2011
The remarkable thing about Caryl Churchill, Max Stafford-Clark has said, is that she is "completely new, every time she comes out of the box". Watching the first act to his revival of her most celebrated work, which Stafford-Clark revisits for... Read more... |
Alice Anderson's Childhood Rituals, Freud MuseumSunday, 24 April 2011
Freud’s West Hampstead house is tied up in a cat’s cradle of thick rope. The rope is the same colour as the brick, a deep orange but with a sheeny lustre. It makes the house look not quite real, a Brobdingnagian doll’s house transplanted to this... Read more... |
Meek's CutoffThursday, 14 April 2011
Kelly Reichardt’s quietly radical vision of the Wild West is a slender, provocatively ambiguous work and the antithesis to the genre’s muscular action-packed epics. It’s a western which aligns us with those who don bonnets rather than Stetsons, and... Read more... |
WOW – Women of the World, Southbank CentreMonday, 14 March 2011
Feminism is a dirty word. Ask anybody. Do they want to be tarred with the label? Do they, hell. The word still carries connotations of man-haters. Even today’s young women fighting against harassment in tube carriages, horrified by the easy... Read more... |
Nancy Spero & Marcus Coates, Serpentine GallerySunday, 13 March 2011
A maypole greets you on entry to the Serpentine Gallery; don’t expect a cheery celebration of spring, though. Nancy Spero’s installation Maypole: Take No Prisoners II (2008) is a scream of rage against violence and its hapless victims. Dangling from... Read more... |
Louise Bourgeois & Tracey Emin, Do Not Abandon Me, Hauser & WirthThursday, 17 February 2011
Louise Bourgeois died last year at nearly 100, a revered figure: survivor of the Surrealist movement into the 21st century, a pioneer of autobiographical expression, whose fame came only late in life. Tracey Emin, by contrast, found fame early,... Read more... |
Art Gallery: GSK Contemporary - Aware: Art Fashion IdentityThursday, 02 December 2010
Fashion and conceptual art come together, sometimes awkwardly, often provocatively, in the Royal Academy’s third and final annual GSK Contemporary exhibition. Instead of celebrating glamour and excess, designers and artists – as well as those, such... Read more... |
The Body in Women’s Art Now: Flux, Rollo Contemporary ArtTuesday, 21 September 2010
Flux, the second in a trio of exhibitions devoted to images of women by women, immediately grabs your attention with an in-your-face animation by Swedish artist Natalie Djurberg. Clay figures enact grotesque stories that have a nasty, fairytale edge... Read more... |
Spitfire Women, BBC FourSaturday, 18 September 2010
“It was the best part of my life,” said one silver-haired lady in ringing tones, while another described it as “poetry” and a third as “the aeroplane and you were one”. What these doughty octogenarians were describing in this gem of a film was... Read more... |
In Their Own Words: British Novelists, BBC FourMonday, 30 August 2010
“The empire writes back” was Salman Rushdie’s pithy summation of the process that changed British literature during the late Seventies and early Eighties, a shift epitomised by his novel Midnight’s Children winning the 1981 Booker prize. It wasn’t... Read more... |
The Girl Who Played With FireSaturday, 28 August 2010
This middle adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium crime trilogy will be followed almost instantly by the last. Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the elfin abuse victim and avenger who is the heart of the Larsson phenomenon, remains compelling. But... Read more... |
