The Art of Feminism: Images that Shaped the Fight for Equality

Sutapa Biswas, in Alice Correia, Defiant Confrontation, pages 132-145.

"In 1988, Along the Lines of Resistance: An Exhibition of Contemporary Feminist Art opened at the Cooper Art Gallery in Barnsley, England. While the exhibiting artists voiced different concerns and addressed different oppressions, the exhibition sought to highlight a single shared expression; that of defiant confrontation.

Curated by Sutapa Biswas, Sarah [Jane] Edge and Clare Slattery, the exhibition showcased the work of twenty young women artists, including Chila Kumari Burman, Sonia Boyce, Mona Hatoum, and Monica Ross. By selecting artists from a variety of social, political, and cultural backgrounds, the curators recognised the plurality of feminist voices in a genre that had previously been dominated by the white middle classes. More significantly, perhaps, the exhibition highlighted the necessity for diverse feminist art practices in the face of Thatcherite politics, which sought to shut down opposition and protest, and made institutional attempts to curtail and historicise the feminist movement itself. The curators noted that, by the late 1980s, feminist art was regarded as quote "yet another category or movement to be named, contained, and passed over."

Central to the exhibition was a concern with "public and private violence", whether in the form of war, colonial oppression, or everyday racism. As such, work detailing the experiences of women during the Northern Irish "Troubles", including Anne Tallentire's performance Altered Tracks (1988) and Trisha Ferguson's etchings Ireland 1, 2, 3 (undated), occupied a shared space of resistance with Maud Sulter and Lubaina Himid's joint installation, A Room for MaShulan (1988), addressing the legacies of colonialism within the African diaspora. One of the most notable works in this exhibition was Chila Kumari Burman's mixed-media diptych Convenience Not Love (1986-87), which focussed on the treatment of South Asian women by UK immigration officials and the forms of control exerted over their bodies by the state."

And:

Sutapa Biswas, in Finding Feminist History: Refiguring the Past, page 145.

"Sutapa Biswas, Housewives with Steak-knives, [1983] - 1985. Biswas made this monumental painting - collage [between 1983 and] 1985 for her final-year degree show at the University of Leeds, UK. The work invokes the Hindu goddess Kali - the creator and the destroyer - who appears here in the guise of an Asian woman. In three of her four hands, Kali holds a flag and a flower, the knife of the title and a severed head; she raises her fourth, red-painted hand, palm out. The figure wears a necklace of severed heads - representing white, patriarchal power - while her flag features a reproduction of Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith Slying Holofernes (ca. 1620). Housewives with Steak-knives, with its invocation of domestic care, brings love and anger, into close proximity, in particular it contends with the characterisation of women, and especially women of Asian heritage with docility. This work marked the end of Biswas's studies at Leeds, during which she entered into a sustained dialogue with her teacher - the feminist art historian Griselda Pollock - concerning the presence of imperialism in the institution. Their interaction shaped both Biswas's work and Pollock's teaching."