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In “Whisper Game: Practicing Attention Through Caring and Pacing,” Basia Sliwinska and Caroline Stevenson experienced embodied knowledge in conversation with Judah Attille, Giovanna Bragaglia, Maria Costantino, Fabiola Fiocco and Alison Green by playing a modified version of the “whisper game,” initiated by a text, asking the participants for other texts in a similar vein and related to it. This game enabled interrelating collectively in methods of knowledge transfer. This resulted in the shared written contribution, “reveal[ing] tensions, hierarchies, and agencies that shape the spaces with/in which we speak, listen, and are heard.”

This chapter traces the contemporary art practices of Chantal Peñalosa (1987, Tecate, Mexico) and Bridget Smith (1966, Essex, England) through a conversation between the artists and the author, a curator. The chapter draws on Kristeva’s (1978) concept of ‘Woman Writing’ and feminist histories of curating to propose a feminist approach to curating that relies on ‘vulnerable listening’ through sustained correspondence and exchange. Through documenting and writing with and through these artists’ practices, their processes of understanding home, place and belonging emerge as ‘epistemic locations’ (Meskimmon, 2020: p 2) – or places of knowing, with their own particular politics.

In this dialogic chapter, we reflect on our collaborative curation of an exhibition that explored domesticity from feminist dissident perspectives. Featuring work protesting the changes to policy concerning domestic violence in Poland (Malgorzata Markiewicz), subverting, through craft, women’s maintenance of the home as both dwelling and ideal (Su Richardson), unpicking maternal subjectivities while staging a confrontation between feminist and modernist approaches to art history (CANAN), and unsettlingly recasting the home as a site of violence and resistance (Paula Chambers), Home Strike (l’étrangère, 2018) is revisited as both an unfinished inter-generational and transnational project critiquing and defamiliarising the home, and an opportunity for reflection and exchange on the curators’ own lived experiences of migration and patriarchal regimes of space. Personal meditations on (un)belonging, temporary habitats and object attachments are interspersed with critical observations on migration, xenophobia and the neoliberal demand for mobility, particularly in the case of cultural workers. As well as (a) correspondence and dialogic reflection on shared preoccupations, what follows is an exchange of letters working through the aftershocks of our co-curation of an exhibition and opening up new strands of thinking and research into projects yet unrealised. The epistolary form was adopted as a practical and equitable record-keeping of our exchange, but also for its rich tradition in feminist politics and thought: as Margaretta Jolly (2008) eloquently demonstrates, in the Women’s Liberation Movement correspondence both charted the emergence of a new consciousness and sisterly alliances, and became a lab for the development of alternative ways of thinking and engaging with one another. Following recent feminist experimentation, we aspire to occupy the space between ‘letter-writing as a formal convention’ (Meskimmon, 2014, 31) and a dialogical critical feminist methodology

This book examines contemporary feminist visual activism(s) through the lens of embodiment(s). The contributors explore how the arts articulate and engage with the current sense of crisis and political concerns (e.g. equality, decolonisation, social justice, democracy, precarity, vulnerability), negotiated with and through the body. Drawing upon the legacy of feminist art historical critique, the book scrutinises activist strategies, practices and resilience techniques in intersectional and transnational frameworks. It interrogates how the arts enable the creation of civil and political resilience, become engaged with politics as a response to disaster capitalism and attempt to reform and improve society.

The relationship between corporeal feminism and materialisms has been addressed in a number of recently emerging writings and artistic projects. In this essay, I focus on Cathy Wilkes' exhibition in the British Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 (although I suggest rather than being a singular event, it belongs to and further evolves her overarching constellation weaving art and life together) and explore her practice of meaning-making and questioning of production of knowledge driven by non-representationalist methodology understood as an affective material inter-action. I propose that Wilkes' practice performs embodied feminist materiality in matter-scapes activating threshold spaces in which intimate care-full encounters emerge. The figure of the threshold animates matter with/in which subjectivity is embedded and embodied, nurturing a care-full response-ability and a political responsibility in the context of patriarchal neoliberal and late-capitalist social structures marked by poverty, unpaid reproductive labour, precarity of work, refugee crisis, incomprehension and social injustice. It invokes vulnerable (resistant) transitions and liminal spaces. Wilkes' constellations grow together through vital matter and liveability.

This volume addresses the evolution of the visual in digital communities, offering a multidisciplinary discussion of the ways in which images are circulated in digital communities, the meanings that are attached to them and the implications they have for notions of identity, memory, gender, cultural belonging and political action. Contributors focus on the political efficacy of the image in digital communities, as well as the representation of the digital self in order to offer a fresh perspective on the role of digital images in the creation and promotion of new forms of resistance, agency and identity within visual cultures. Edited by Basia Sliwinska

From the publishers website: This volume addresses the evolution of the visual in digital communities, offering a multidisciplinary discussion of the ways in which images are circulated in digital communities, the meanings that are attached to them and the implications they have for notions of identity, memory, gender, cultural belonging and political action. Contributors focus on the political efficacy of the image in digital communities, as well as the representation of the digital self in order to offer a fresh perspective on the role of digital images in the creation and promotion of new forms of resistance, agency and identity within visual cultures.

While the lens based image can be seen as a simple manifestation of our ability to make records and to document, it is also a philosophical meditation on the specific power visuality, and its unique ability to shape ethical, moral and aesthetic perceptions.

The author discusses the concept of denizenship and the different articulations of embodied transnational belonging, exploring projects by Joanna Rajkowska and Nada Prlja. Through metaphors of an ecotone and edge habitat, facilitating exchange within and between communities, she examines spaces across and in-between in which national identifications of individuals in Europe are deconstructed. The article discusses transition (through Rajkowska's artistic practice) and tension (through Prlja's artistic practice) zones, drawing upon Jacques Derrida's discourse on hospitality, in order to seek for alternative modes of thinking about citizenship. These are based on generosity, friendship, hospitality and acknowledge locatedness of individuals and the space in-between - being here and there, at home and not at home. Rajkowska and Prlja's projects offer fresh and innovative articulations of cosmopolitan and hospitable spaces, which enable communities based on identification with others.

In the chapter "The Aesthetic of Pedestrianism" and the Politics of Belonging in Contemporary Women's Art by Basia Sliwinska, the author is based on the famous work of Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, taking the example of Alice as flâneuse : "Alice is adventurous and curious. She is an explorer. She walks through this unfamiliar land and experiences the space. When she asks the Cheshire Cat which path to take and when the Cat tells her she depends on where she wants to get, she says, "I do not care much where (...) so long as I get somewhere (Carroll 1998, 56) "

The focus of the issue is on the concept of home in a transnational perspective. The articles included address feminist art and theory, and global studies which share a tendency to ‘think across’ disciplines, gender, place or materiality. The authors explore artistic practice in terms of ‘trans-figurations’ – material forms of thought operating across gender, place and belonging. They conceptualise the concept of home within the politics of domesticity and ideologies of nationhood and citizenship, as a powerful construct enabling the questioning of the production of space. The aim of this special issue is to activate thinking about home, identity and space in a transnational perspective drawing from feminist discourse.

In his theory of the 'mirror stage', the psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan argued that the female body is defined by its lack of male attributes. Within this framework, he described female sexuality primarily as an absence, and assumed female subordination to the male gaze. However, what happens if one follows Jean Baudrillard's advice to 'swallow the mirror' and go through the 'looking-glass' to explore the reflections and realities that we encounter in the cultural mirror, which reflects the culture in question: its norms, ideals and values? What if the beautiful is inverted and becomes ugly; and the ugly is considered beautiful or shape-shifts into something conventionally thought of as beautiful? These are the fundamental questions that Basia Sliwinska poses in this important new enquiry into gender identity and the politics of vision in contemporary women's art.Through an innovative discussion of the mirror as a metaphor, Sliwinska reveals how the post-1989 practices of woman artists from both sides of the former Iron Curtain - such as Joanna Rajkowska, Marina Abramovic, Boryana Rossa, Natalia LL and Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova - go beyond gender binaries and instead embrace otherness and difference by playing with visual tropes of femininity. Their provocative works offer alternative representations of the female body to those seen in the cultural mirror. Their art challenges and deconstructs patriarchal representations of the social and cultural 'other', associated with visual tropes of femininity such as Alice in Wonderland, Venus and Medusa. The Female Body in the Looking-Glass makes a refreshing, radical intervention into art theory and cultural studies by offering new theoretical concepts such as 'the mirror' and 'genderland' (inspired by Alice's adventures in Wonderland) as critical tools with which we can analyse and explain recent developments in women's art.

This paper seeks to explore the gift of space in which restrictions concerning access to public space are lifted or challenged through articulations of women’s art-making. The concept of the gift is complex and it entails thinking about the conditions generated by the acceptance of a gift. I am particularly interested in art practices that allow for access to space mobilising positive modes of co-habitation and encouraging generosity and hospitality. Partum and Rajkowska, by questioning spatial environments and offering them as a gift, invite participation and reconciliation. Their acts of giving foster reciprocity that in turn generate hospitable and generous responses. Their interventions open up spaces for communal belonging.

This Third Text special issue addresses feminist art and theory, and global studies that share a tendency to ‘think across’ disciplines, gender, place or materiality. The selected articles explore women's artistic practices in terms of ‘trans-figurations’ – material forms of thought operating across gender, place and belonging. Home is a natural place of belonging, but if conceptualised within the politics of domesticity and ideologies of nationhood and citizenship, it becomes apparent as a powerful construct both born out of the production of space and yet enabling the questioning of the same. The objective of the issue is to activate thinking about home, identity and space in a transnational perspective drawing upon contemporary feminist discourse and scholarship.

Through examining practices of contemporary women artists I focus on practices of embodiment, which inscribe the body within spatial production. Walking in the public spaces can be liberating and joyful. It can also point towards more complex issues associated with politics of belonging and female participation and inscription into the public spaces. Walking, as a spatial encounter, becomes an embodied form of experiencing and appropriating space. Women artists explore their corporeality within urban environments and transform places into spaces through purposeful walking. Their movements as pedestrians delineate a multitude of paths weaving space through their bodies. They actively observe and appropriate the city as habitable and produce and practise space through the movement of the body. The female pedestrian subjects deactivate the city as a gendered space objectifying them into an urban spectacle. I argue the aesthetics of pedestrianism facilitates female belonging through awakening locational identity. Keynote of Panel 1: Rethinking the city walk in modern and contemporary art.

Images shared in digital communities produce and communicate identities across physical and virtual spheres. This paper explores the new potentiality of images as active agents of resistance and political action.