Together with Ukrainian participants of the interdisciplinary art program, we will discuss how feminist optics operates today within the field of the moving image. At the centre of the conversation are women’s stories, experiences of motherhood, war, engagements with the unconscious, and reflections on representation. We will address reproductive labour as (in)visible work underpinning social and cultural structures, consider how maternal narratives shape personal and collective memory, how connections to childhood construct identity, and reflect on what is present and absent in language and in our recollections. The discussion will be an attempt to outline a specifically female way of seeing reality in conditions of war, and to approach feminist optics as an instrument for analyzing culture and everyday life.
Participants:
Kateryna Ruzhyna, Teta Tsybulnyk, Anna Shcherbyna, Kateryna Voznytsia, Svitlana Dovbush
Moderator:
Oksana Briukhovetska
Oksana Briukhovetska is an artist, curator, and researcher. She works with themes of memory, trauma, feminist art, and intersectionality. She is the author of texts on contemporary art, co-editor (with Lesia Kulchynska) of the collection The Right to Truth: Conversations on Art and Feminism, and the author of the book Voices of Black Lives Matter. She has curated feminist art projects in Ukraine and abroad, and works with textiles as a feminist medium.
