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.