Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts

This book builds new visions of belonging and new articulations of place and space through various models of artistic practice by women. Exploring how these practices reclaim and renegotiate space - institutional, urban, or natural - it interrogates the politics of artistic practice as a means of creating transnational networks of solidarity.

Presenting a collection of case studies detailing the practices of womxn artists from China, Europe, North America and Latin America, the book considers relationships between artmaking, process and belonging. This transnational framework activates solidarity at a time of intensified divisions, partitioning global narratives, unequal trajectories.

The contributors engage in a conversation signalling transversal thinking and artmaking in order to articulate and activate ‘in-between’ spaces. Organised around the triangulation of modes of belonging: spatial, affective and collective, these essays consider ways in which female agency disrupts borders and activates concerns around different forms of citizenship. Considering the current time of rising nationalisms and erecting borders, this book offers new narratives that build bridges across cultures; it's wide coverage will inform new directions in interdisciplinary research in visual culture, feminism, transnationalism, and cross-cultural anthropology.

Cover Image credit: Keren Anavy, Garden of Living Images (2018), general installation view (detail). Courtesy of the artist and Wave Hill. Photographer: Stefan Hagen

Basia Sliwinska is an art historian and theorist working as a Research Fellow at the NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal. Recent books include Feminist Visual Activism and the Body, editor (2021), The Evolution of the Image: Political Action and the Digital Self, co-editor (2018) and the monograph The Female Body in the Looking-Glass: Contemporary Art, Aesthetics and Genderland (2016).

Catherine Dormor, PhD is Professor of Textile Practices and Feminisms at the University of Westminster, UK, where she is also Head of Westminster School of Arts. A practicing artist and researcher, her recent publications include the co-edited book The Erotic Cloth: Seduction and Fetishism in Textiles (2018) and A Philosophy of Textile: Between Practice & Theory (2020). She is Regional Editor (Europe) for Textile: the Journal of Cloth & Culture and her artworks feature in a number of international collections.