Resist: be modern (again)

This project focused on collaborations, often as partners, between avant-garde women artists, designers, writers and performers of 1920s and 1930s. Whilst the women were well known, within Paris of 1920s and during the Harlem Renaissance, their names are absent within the canon due to gender, sexuality or ethnicity. Within the exhibition Resist: be modern (again), John Hansard Gallery 2019, contemporary artists activated these early practices through new works utilising processes of mapping, transcribing, sampling, referencing, reciting, re-telling, or re-making. Evoking Carolyn Dinshaw’s writings, the exhibition aspired to “an impulse toward making connections across time between, on the one hand, lives, texts and other cultural phenomena left out of current sexual categories back then and, on the other, those left of current sexual categories now…”, the “…aim is not to expose, explain, fix or demonstrate but to conjure, perform and continue” (Dinshaw, 1999)._ Key challenges during the research process were that in some cases there is very little to access within archives, particularly regarding the BAME practitioners including Bricktop and other women of the Harlem Renaissance. Participating contemporary practitioners including Riet Wijnen, S. Louisa Wei and Tanoa Sasraku-Ansah, pieced together from footnotes, brief entries within biographies of better-known artists, photographs, giving presence to these missing practitioners of the 1920s. We developed an exhibition design based on 1920s Lily Reich display system, which allowed us to bring together archival and contemporary works within innovative steel, fabric and wooden modular systems. Resist: be modern (again) was disseminated through a large-scale exhibition at John Hansard Gallery in 2019, within which we displayed both archival materials and new works. A substantial catalogue of the exhibition includes writings from theorists Gemma Romain, Shane Vogel, Jasmine Rault, Bridget Elliott and Laura Cottingham. Workshops, educational events, and a symposium took place at John Hansard gallery.

A multi-component output consisting of:
(1) Maude-Roxby, Alice and Seibold, Stefanie (2019) Resist: be modern (again). [Show/Exhibition]
(2) Maude-Roxby, Alice and Seibold, Stefanie (2019) Resist: be modern (again). [Exhibition Catalogue]