“A Dinner Party: setting the table”
Caroline Phillips and Victoria Duckett
3 Sept → 16 Sept 2012

A Dinner Party: setting the table, is a collaborative project curated by Caroline Phillips and Victoria Duckett. It is a cross- media workshop and forum that brings a range of feminist artists, scholars, and social commentators together to explore feminist art today. The project is the first step towards the realization of a larger feminist exhibition (The F Word) which will tour regional Victoria in 2014, later coming to rest in Melbourne.

Using Judy Chicago’s iconic feminist work The Dinner Party (1974 – 1979) as a starting point for research and dialogue, the workshop will explore the local questions and challenges which drive feminist art today. It is also space in which we will together develop feminist artwork.

A Dinner Party: Setting the Table – Program of events
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Thursday 6th September, 6-8pm
Knitting Circle with Kate Just
For experienced knitters, please bring along a piece you are working on, to knit and talk with others.
If you are just a beginner, you are welcome to come and learn some simple skills, byo wool, 6-8ply and needles, minimum 4mm size.

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Friday 7th September, 6-8pm
Imaging Her World: Feminist Visions
WestSpace and OtherFilm will co-present Imaging Her World: Feminist Visions, a screening dedicated to feminist experimental film and women’s cinema. Taking off from the liberated visions of experimental film makers in the 1960s, female experimental film makers used the apparatus to call into question the representation of woman on the screen and the structural order implicit in narrative, using representational tactics and the materiality of film itself as tools, working toward an experimental cinema which critiqued modes of screened ‘being’, while creating radical new film works with a spirit of rigorous experiment and terrific fun.

This program screens works from the USA, Australia and UK, from Hammer & Saxton’s Dyketactics, a ‘lesbian commercial’ in kinaesthesic editing mode, to the formal experiments of Lis Rhodes’ Dresden Dynamo (applying Letraset and Letratone to clear film stock), the fragmented narratives and explorations of gendered and family life in Adynata and A Song Of Air, closing with Gunvor Nelson’s Take Off/The Stripper, two short films which function as a feminist address of striptease.

The films will all be screened in 16mm. Projectionist Marcia Jane.

This program is co-curated by Danni Zuvela, of Brisbane-based experimental and avant-garde collective Other Film, and local critic and researcher Jon Dale.

Barbara Hammer & Christine Saxton – Dyketactics (USA, 1974, 4 mins.)
Leslie Thornton – Adynata (USA, 1983, 29 mins.)
Lis Rhodes – Dresden Dynamo (UK, 1974, 5 mins.)
Merilee Bennett – A Song of Air (Australia, 1988, 27 mins.)
Gunvor Nelson – Take Off/The Stripper (USA, 1960, 11 mins.)

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Saturday 8th September
Feminist Forum Day

11-1pm: Dialogues in 1970s feminist art
Guests: Dr. Kate MacNeill, Juliette Peers, Virginia Fraser and Stephanie Alexander

Lunch: donated by Moroccan Soup Bar.
2-4 pm: Where we are now?
Guests: Dr. Anne Marsh, Victoria Bennett, Hana Assafiri, Lyndal Walker.

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Thursday 13th, 6-8pm
“Her Humour: Sex and Satire in Contemporary Victorian Art”
Speakers: Laura Castagnini, Catherine Deveny, Inez de Vega, Victoria Duckett

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Sat 15th, 2-4 pm
Time Capsule – Film program curated by Virginia Fraser
A program of short films made in Australia and the United States between 1969 and 1976 during a historical moment when sexism, ‘sexual liberation’ and feminism collided and feminism got the upper hand. Plus one or two earlier films pointing in that direction. From naïve, playful and aesthetically blunt to politically and aesthetically subtle and astute, the films in this program focus on two of the preoccupations of seventies feminism – the gendered body, and aspirations to different, better lives. The films variously include time lapse animation, home movie footage, surrealism, a silent film that sparked a riot in a cinema, a film that Bunuel and Bergman seem to have borrowed from, several prize winners and plenty of humour.
The US films were first shown in Australia at the 1975 International Women’s Film Festival and, along with most of the Australian films in the program, were held in the Independent Women’s Film Collection of the now defunct Sydney Film-makers Co-op which opened its distribution department in 1974 and closed in 1986.

We Should Call It a Living Room 1974
8.5 mins colour sound (Australia)
Joan Grounds, Alecks Danko, David Lourie, David Stewart and Roger Frampton from an idea by Mischka Buhler

I Change, I Am the Same 1969
30 secs b/w sound (US)
Anne Severson (now AliceAnne Parker)

River Body 1970
5 mins b/w sound (US)
Anne Severson (AliceAnne Parker)

Near the Big Chakra 1972
15 mins colour silent (US)
Anne Severson (AliceAnne Parker)

We Aim to Please 1977
13 mins colour sound (Australia)
Margot Nash and Robyn Laurie

Bettina’s Substitute 1912 ***tbc
14 mins b/w silent with intertitles (US)
Albert W Hale

Woman in a House 1974
13 mins b/w sound (Australia)
Sue Ford

At Land 1944
15 mins b/w silent (US)
Maya Deren

Home Movie 1972
10 minutes colour sound (US)
Jan Oxenberg

What I Want 1971
14 mins colour sound (US)
Sharon Hennessey

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The Back Space at West Space will be used as gallery and studio space throughout the period 5th to 15th September, all welcome to drop in and see what’s happening.

For more information on the project please visit our Facebook Page or listen to the SYN FM Get Cereal Interview