SESSION: Contemporary Proto-Feminisms: Reclaiming Historical Femininity in Practice and Criticism
This session invites presentations on contemporary visual art and recent art histories (post-1960) that revise and iterate upon proto-feminism. It asks: how might we extend and revise the term ‘proto-feminism’ beyond its conventional grounding in literary and art historical discourse tied to the rise of modern political feminism? Can it be used or remade to describe contemporary artistic strategies that reclaim, embody, or complicate historical feminine identities?
Historically, proto-feminism has been used to describe figures who articulated women’s rights before the emergence of the modern feminist movements. However, this framing often centres Western, linear notions of political emancipation and is critiqued for projecting present-day, dominant, White feminist values onto past contexts.
The session seeks contributions that investigate how proto-feminism is refigured through engagement with diverse histories of femininity by current artistic practices and critical methodologies in art history and art criticism. Topics may include—but are not limited to—marginalised global histories of femininity; colonial legacy; myth and folk-lore; ancestral, spiritual rituals; deep-time organisms and non-human life; archaeology and anthropology; non-linear and speculative temporalities, e.g. time travel; anachronistic reading; ghosts and the undead; genealogies and inheritance; archive-based interventions such as critical fabulation and esoteric knowledge systems associated with femme identities. The session is 2 hours long and will include up to 4 research papers or artistic presentations of 20 minutes, followed by a convened debate and Q&A.
Session Convenors:
Helen Kaplinsky, Liverpool John Moores University, Exhibition Research Lab
Speakers:
Alex Bispham, The Courtauld Institute of Art
The queer-feminist practice of Hilma’s Ghost: a material perspective on haunting
This paper examines the New-York-based collective Hilma’s Ghost with a queer-feminist approach. Formed by Sharmistha Ray and Dannielle Tegeder in 2020, their spiritual project involves “experimental pedagogy, transcultural dialogue, and collectivity” to reckon with heteropatriarchal histories.
I draw on feminist scholar and quantum physicist Karen Barad’s work as I position spiritual artworks as instantaneous material meeting points between immaterial planes. Material analysis makes way for non-linear forms of kinship with historically marginalised figures.
I thereby assess Hilma’s Ghost’s queer hauntology: how they channel women, trans, and non-binary practitioners in order to reappropriate forgotten spiritual and artistic practices. In doing so, they collapse dualisms of mind/spirit, matter/form, reason/emotion, presence/absence, art/technology, etc., to forge an expansive definition of femininity beyond paradigms of gender, sexuality, and race.
I begin by discussing their explicit invocation of Hilma af Klint in their abstract painting practice. While af Klint has been positioned as a lone abstract pioneer, through their work Ray and Tegeder highlight the queer-spiritual collaboration behind works attributed to her. This allows us to move beyond linear genealogies of modernism.
The artists are equally haunted by other proto-feminist figures with whom they collaborate in spiritual rituals: from Hildegard von Bingen to nameless practitioners of nineteenth-century theorem painting.
Ray’s research into sacred eastern belief systems and non-binary identity contributes to the collective’s digital cosmologies that refigure the self beyond gendered bodies. Their feminist work requires decolonial methodologies, too.
Hence, Hilma’s Ghost gesture to the future: a spiritual, artistic, and political emancipation for all.
Kate Pickering, Goldsmiths, University of London
‘There is a Miracle in Your Mouth’ (A Reading)
‘There is a Miracle in Your Mouth’ is an experimental, book-length work, shortlisted for the Prototype Prize (2024) for writing at the intersection of artistic and literary forms. The text is formed of narratives from three different sites: the dis/believing body of an exvangelical recounting her experiences within the evangelical movement, a spectacular Texan evangelical megachurch caught in the midst of a hurricane and a fourteenth-century anchorite cell in which medieval visionary and writer Julian of Norwich is permanently enclosed. Foregrounding Julian as a precursor to contemporary feminisms, I will read sections of the book that detail her life, including how she became an anchorite through a ritualistic ceremony in which she committed to never leaving her cell (her anchorhold). The anchorhold conveyed the symbolism of the medieval church as a boat that required the anchorite to keep it steady, through the sacrificial act of dying to her former life to serve the church. Julian, enclosed in a cell that also symbolised both womb and tomb, had limited contact with the outside world. However, she transcribes her visions, experienced by the suffering feminine body, and develops them into a powerful theology, affording her a heretical understanding of God as pure love without judgement. In the resulting book ‘Revelations of Divine Love’, she insists that, even as a woman, she should speak of what she has seen and understood, challenging the patriarchal silencing of the institution in which she was housed.
Evan Ifekoya, Independent
Helen Kaplinsky, Liverpool John Moores University, Exhibition Research Lab
Incubating in the cracks of the broken shell in ‘An Act of Digital Devotion’ (2024) by Evan Ifekoya
An Act of Digital Devotion (2024), Evan Ifekoya’s interactive web-based artwork, adopts the alchemical and devotional symbolism of the egg—whole, broken, and continually becoming. Through sound, ritual, and archival intervention, Ifekoya instigates an exchange with Ghanaian-Scottish photographer Maud Sulter (1960–2008), whom they recognise as a spiritual Black queer ancestor.
Kaplinsky proposes expanding the term proto-feminism to describe how Ifekoya honours esoteric connection through nonlinear storytelling. The artwork becomes a temporal portal that enables communion with a predecessor whose symbolic language is both sacred and infrastructural. These strands meet in the ruptures of patriarchal time and in the dispersed temporalities that structure queer and femme labour.
An Act of Digital Devotion riffs on the divinatory traditions embedded in Sulter’s imagery. The smashed egg that forms the website’s backdrop is borrowed from Zabat (1989), where a sitter holds a whole ostrich egg. Sulter describes the egg as an embodiment of multiplicity, fecundity, and hidden architectures of power—containing “both the chicken and the egg, both the past, the present, and the future.”
Ifekoya foregrounds the shell’s vulnerability: a fragmented casing escaping into a landscape, a scattered archive, a feminist method. Invoking Christina Sharpe’s insistence on shards that reveal rather than resolve, fragmentation becomes a proto-feminist tactic through which history is continually remade. Here, fragments are openings—portals through which floating voices, images, and mythologies are re-encountered in the present. Incubating in the cracks of the broken shell is a queer, pragmatic means of de-producing knowledge, an action that unfolds not within architectures of wholeness but in the spaces between.
The format of the presentation will be: 5min reading of introduction, 10min video presentation, 5min reading of conclusion.