WOMEN IN REVOLT!
TATE BRITAIN
8 NOVEMBER 2023 - 7 APRIL 2024
The Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt! was “the largest show ever mounted” at the historic British institution, “with more than 100 artist and collective represented” (Cumming, 2023). Displaying women’s protest art from 1970-1990, the behemoth exhibition highlighted the history of second-wave feminism through countless artworks, pamphlets and other materials, not necessarily originally intended for display. The show, open in London from November 2023-April 2024, was well received by the press and critics, and will tour to Edinburgh and Manchester over 2024 and 2025. Despite this, on visiting the show I felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of artefacts and objects sprawled across the walls and found the layout of the exhibit somewhat reductive. While the show was not directly about blackness, it was about women’s issues including the struggles faced by women of colour. The curatorial methods fell short of understanding how Black audiences might receive the exhibition and it seemed to be targeted to the Tate’s already heavily white audience.
The exhibition was split across six sections over nine rooms tackling different aspects of women’s struggles over the 20-year period it covered, including equal pay, rape and domestic violence, housework, LGBTQ+ rights, AIDs, the rights of women of colour and more. The show “[drew] from the exhibitions and publications these women produced while acknowledging the challenges they face” and highlights how “access to the history of women’s art has not been equal to that of their male counterparts” to “[attempt] to redress this balance” (Tate, 2023). The exhibition attempts to “[survey] feminist art with… seriousness” with a distinct and intentional lack of anything feminine or pretty; the show is gritty, powerful and provocative, and there are ‘no totemic vulvas’ as there may have been in earlier large-scale feminist exhibitions (Searle, 2023). This seriousness places value and importance on the artworks displayed and does justice to what the artists and activists went through as part of their process, whilst handling the difficult topics with sensitivity. When a curator is “navigating controversy and handling sensitive subjects [they] really need to think about… where there is a boundary between ethics and morals… to provoke conversation, debate, discussion… it's a real balancing act of how you land that” and Women in Revolt! Fails to balance its sensitive content and histories with how it presents this information (Carroll, 2024).
The theme of British feminist activism is huge, and to succinctly cover 20 years of protest spanning vast cultural movements such as Punk and second-wave Feminism would be near to impossible. Every piece and artefact for this exhibition as meticulously chosen and while the amount of displayed material with its heavy historical context was overwhelming for the mind and senses, one can understand why the exhibition felt crammed. Arguably, “the misjudgement of parading ephemera as gallery-worthy exhibits is fatal — and a wasted opportunity” (Wullschlager, 2023). This ultimately led to black, disability and queer activism feeling sidelined and surrounding a general feminism solely pertaining to white women’s issues. Perhaps narrowing the scope of the exhibition might have made it more accessible – of course to leave out Black, Queer and Disability activism would be remiss, but this case study highlights the importance of not overwhelming a limited space with curation that is too ambitious in scope.
The two rooms focused on issues faced by women of colour are polarising. Titled Black Woman Time Now, this section “[foregrounds] some of those artists who defined Black feminist art in the UK. Exploring the intersections of race, gender and sexuality, their work recognises a shared experience of racism and discrimination” (Williamson, 2023). Artists featured in this room include Lubaina Himid, Rita Keegan, Marlene Smith and Chila Kumari Singh Burman. The works displayed show a pivotal moment in feminist history and are individually beautiful yet harrowing pieces, and still the curation felt somewhat incoherent. While the artworks displayed intend to represent the cultural history and significance of the overall work done by the artists included in the rooms, it was difficult to parse the similarities in history, messaging and intention between the different works. The only uniting factor seems to be artworks created by women of colour on the topics of race and gender, which “as a curatorial thesis… isn’t really enough to bind all these artists together” (O’Leary, 2024). For example, the works address political blackness and talk about race, however the inclusion of Indian Women Artists did not feel wholly relevant as they racism faced by Indian women is different to that of women of African or Caribbean descent. Political blackness “was used to acknowledge solidarity between those who faced discrimination based on their skin colour”, but this term is outdated (Tate, 2023). Blackness is not a catch-all term for those who are racialised and this homogenisation causes a loss of nuance amongst the vastly different experiences of racism between different races; “the colour of a person’s skin has nothing to do with what they produce” per se (Banson, 2024).
It is important to note that Black issues specifically, as well as LGBTQ+ and disability issues, were highlighted and given their own space, however according to the principles of intersectionality these traits are intertwined causing myriad issues when subject to white patriarchy. Is it therefore reductive to have a room for just Black issues, with a distinct lack of Black artists mentioned in the disability, LGBTQ+ and general rooms? The reduction of Black women’s activism to two small rooms and the failure to include Black activist art elsewhere, despite it being relevant to non-Black specific issues, feels reductive, particularly in an exhibition that was so overloaded with artefacts and information to an overwhelming extent. Perhaps this aims to represent the “feminist separatism” (Searle, 2023) of the 1970s-1990s, yet it seems to negate Crenshaw’s third-wave feminist concept of intersectionality which is arguably the most widely accepted framework used to examine the layered effects and complexities of white patriarchal societies.
The section on Black Activist art in the section entitled ‘Black Woman Time Now’ also includes work by Asian-British artists. It feels extremely limiting to include any non-white art in this exhibition as Black art – Asian-British people face different forms of racism and hold a different relationship with Britain compared to their Black diasporic counterparts. This instance exemplifies how “different people have an understanding of what it means to be of a particular background [when curating race]… everyone enters the space with their agenda” (Banson, 2024). The notion of Blackness can be applied to some Asian communities as a self-identifier, but one can assume that when discussing the idea of being Black this usually pertains to people of African descent. Therefore, it feels as though Artists of Colour were lumped into one section with little thought and for little reason other than for the sake of being non-white. Does this not reinforce historic othering that the activists in the exhibition sought to dismantle? With more audience consultation instead of artist-focused research this may have been avoided.
“The team at Tate Britain [was] led by Linsey Young”, Curator of Contemporary British Art at the Tate Modern who created “an in-depth, five-year research project” that consisted of mostly “interviews with artists” who had “little or no access to public institutions” at the time of their activism” (Greenan, Pollock and Smith, 2023: p. 10; Farquharson, 2023: p.9). She worked with assistant curators Zuzana Flaskova and Hannah Marsh, as well as collaborated with specialist organisations – Marsh is a Black woman of colour and specialist in feminist and Black British art, suggesting some care was taken in selecting an appropriate curatorial team (Yinka Shonibare Foudnation, 2022). This indicates that a form of exclusive practice was used to curate, as the curatorial methods were limited to a small team with the aim of maintaining the sanctity of how the curator interprets the materials (Villeneuve and Love, 2021: p.137). This is a good approach to curating blackness and race as previously explained; however, this alone is not enough to consider Women in Revolt! successful at portraying blackness.
The busyness of the entire show overwhelmed and distracted from the intended purpose of telling a story of activism through art and culturally relevant materials. The thematic rooms felt reductive and homogenised the experiences of women of colour, losing the nuance between the different intersectional experiences of sexism and racism. Curatorially it would have been more responsible for Young to fully collaborate or partner with people and artists from the communities being exhibited. Young did work with institutions such as the Black Cultural Archives for this show, but did not disclose the extent of collaboration nor claim any formal partnership on the specific room about blackness: the “non-Black curator [should] step aside and literally allow somebody with the understanding to work alongside them or lead” (Hanson-Ellesse, 2024). While it was an intellectually stimulating and important show, perhaps if the exhibition had narrowed its scope or been physically bigger it may have been able to avoid these issues.
