Instituting feminism

"Instituting Feminism,” this issue of OnCurating, reflects on the efforts of curators, artists, and community organisers to move beyond identifying inequities in the cultural industries to devising tools that can foster structural change. Exploring how curators have developed projects informed by feminist politics and aesthetics, contributors also look beyond representational formats to highlight the infrastructures and co-dependencies upon which cultural production relies. They understand that feminism’s integration into the mainstream art world has been accompanied by a tokenistic “pink-washing,” and thus raise questions about the terms under which gestures of “inclusion” and “participation” occur. Envisaging feminist instituting as an active, relational practice, articles discuss curatorial, artistic, and organisational initiatives that seek to forge alliances with struggles for ecological and social transformation. The projects and perspectives represented here foreground the need for new subjectivities, caring alliances, and support structures that offer alternatives to toxic contemporary labour conditions, including those endemic to art and curating. They hold out promise for more equitable and reciprocal ways of working, producing, and coexisting. by Helena Reckitt and Dorothee Richte