Date: 11 July 2016 to 17 July 2016
Venue: Screening Room and Utopia Treasury, South Wing, Somerset House, London
A programme of events that places women at the centre of discussions and debates about walking and art. Part of UTOPIA 2016: A Year of Imagination and Possibility – Four Seasons of events, exhibitions and new commissions celebrating the idea of utopia to mark the 500th anniversary of Thomas More’s influential text.
The invisibility of women in what appears as a canon of walking is conspicuous; where they are included, it is often as an ‘exception’ to an unstated norm, represented by a single chapter in a book or even a footnote.
– Heddon and Turner (2012) ‘Walking Women: Shifting the Tales and Scales of Mobility’ Contemporay Theatre Review, Vol. 22(2), 2012, p. 225
How do we re-write a canon? How do we re-balance the perception of art, artists, and the use of walking as a creative practice? Can we not only imagine a future in which gender bias and skewed vision is destroyed, but actively build the pathway there?
These events are a step on that path. Bringing together artists from across disciplines – theatre makers, writers, sculptors, film makers, poets, live artists and visual artists with academics, curators and cultural critics to discuss, present, create, record, broadcast and make public the work of WALKING WOMEN.