There's Hope in being a Killjoy

To not take part in a system if that system is inequitable is a staple rallying call of feminist manifestos. Most recently, radical thinker Sarah Ahmed summed it up in the need to be a killjoy . But how would a killjoy approach art? Elvira Vannini , art historian and curator, is clear: by disrupting art’s supposed innocence, a patriarchal myth, self-sustaining via the exclusion of art conceived and crafted by anyone but white men.

Through a selection of works centred around US and South American artists active in the 1970s, Vannini illustrates how art and art criticism can serve as a political acts . Recognising these subversive artworks as actual is not simply a truism about all art “worth something”, but an act of defiance and renewed feminist solidarity. And so she introduces the audience to works by Suzanne Lacy ( Three Weeks in May ), and how she literally put rapes “on the map” of LA to protest their occurrence and chastise mainstream indifference. Or how Ana Mendieta ( Blood Writing ) fought the taboo of the body, long absent as a vehicle of art except in idealised and objectifying forms, with her unsettling portrayal of violence against women.

Unbound just like its subject(s), the conversation zig-zags, from the diffusion of feminist art within transnational movements to the balance between tokenism and equity in the artistic recognition of afro-descendants. Throughout, Vannini follows some kind of understated feminist pedagogy. She co-creates her lecture with audience members: Speaking “side by side” the artists and the public is her credo, a radical hopefulness which doesn't feel joyless at all .