Practicing Sexual Difference
Workshop with Alex Martinis Roe
28 September 5-7pm
@ Women's Art Library/Make
Free to attend RSVP
In this workshop, radical Italian feminist practices developed by the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective and others in the mid 1970s form a reference point for a series of practical tasks undertaken in groups and pairs. Starting with some discussion of different practices like autocoscienza (consciousness raising), the practice of relationships, the practice of doing, and affidamento (entrustment), we will then work in small groups to identify our individual “symbolic mothers”; relations of affidamento that we experience in our own lives; and potential practices of doing. Although the content of the workshop is focused on female sexual difference, people of all sexual identities are welcome to participate. The aim of the workshop is to explore the contemporary relevance of practices of sexual difference: as specific political acts, they move away from ideological models of collective politics, but nevertheless connect to one another. With special attention to the politics of documentation, we will record and annotate aspects of each encounter with these practices, forming an archive within the Women’s Art Library.
Alex Martinis Roe (b. 1982, Melbourne) is concerned with the performative efficacy of art and facilitating feminist relations within the art encounter and its historicization. Her work explores the affectivity of theoretical exchange and seeks to bring these moments between authorships into art contexts. She completed her PhD in Fine Arts at Monash University Australia with the Silver Jubilee Scholarship in 2011. In 2006-7 she was a resident at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne; in 2011 undertook a residency at Seoul Artspace Geumcheon; and since 2009 has lived and worked at Kunsthaus KuLe, Berlin. Recent shows include Autobiography of a Collective, Society, Sydney (solo) (2012); Collective Biographies, Bibliothekswohnung, Berlin (solo) (2012); Post-planning, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne (2012); non-writing histories, Artspace, Sydney (solo) (2012); Letters from the Field, Atelierhof Kreuzberg, Berlin (2012); Genealogies; Frameworks for Exchange, Pallas Projects, Dublin (solo) (2011); Denkmalpflege, Heidelberger Kunstverein (2011); HaVE A LoOk! Have a Look! FormContent, London (2010); Encounters: Conversation in Practice, Limbus Europae, Berlin (solo) (2010); Opening Lines, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melboune (2010). In 2012 she gave a presentation at Salon Populaire as part of What is Power Today? and taught Lecture Performance at the Public School, Berlin. Martinis Roe has been published in art magazines such as Art Monthly, Australia (2012), Art Papers, USA (2011), Art & Australia (2009).
photo by Alex Martinis Roe @ Women's Art Library, 2012
