Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image
Erika Balsom (Department of Film Studies), Sean Maroney (Research Impact Development Associate)
This project brought overlooked histories of feminist filmmaking to new audiences through exhibitions, screenings, publications and public programming. Led by Erika Balsom (Department of Film Studies), the project centred documentary and experimental film and video that challenges industrial and commercial norms, showing how much the films made by past women’s liberation movements still have to say to audiences today.
The funding supported the culmination of two long-running collaborations. In Oslo, the touring exhibition No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, staged with Kunstnernes Hus, reached the final stop of a tour that had already travelled to Berlin and Warsaw, drawing strong attendance and press coverage across all three cities. In London, the eight-year screening series The Machine That Kills Bad People, run with curator Maria Palacios Cruz and artists Beatrice Gibson and Ben Rivers at the ICA, closed with the publication of a co-edited collection of the thirty-nine commissioned essays.
These outputs are now feeding into further research and public-facing work, including essays in New Left Review and Camera Obscura, and a forthcoming book developing themes from a display shown at the Hamburg Kunstverein, on an Italian feminist collective featured in No Master Territories.
For full details of the project, please see the PDF case study below.