Contested Bodies Exhibition Catalogue

CONTESTED BODIES 1

The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery 25 October 2023 – 6 April 2024

CONTESTED BODIES 2

FOREWORD With the restriction of women’s reproductive rights in the United States and the increasing policing of and violence against trans and other non-conforming bodies around the globe, the group exhibition Contested Bodies could not have come at a more opportune time. Leeds has a long history of feminist and LGBTQI+ activism and advocacy, and the University of Leeds has played a key role in it through both radical and internationally recognised research and teaching and the progressive work done by its student societies. As a case in point, 2024 will mark fifty years since the first UK academic conference on trans issues was held at the University of Leeds, an organisation that prides itself in placing equity, diversity and inclusion at its core and aims to create a supportive environment that is reflective of its community.

Featuring works made over the last decade in painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, printmaking and video, Contested Bodies is a group exhibition that interrogates and celebrates the performativity of gender as a social construct. Appropriating the title of a course from the MA in Gender Studies at the University of Leeds, Contested Bodies brings together the work of over forty artists from across the gender spectrum. Using the body as their subject matter or medium, these artists insist upon the legitimation of bodies and bodily expressions that society has, in Judith Butler’s words, ‘regarded as false, unreal or unintelligible’. In their respective practices, some explore gender stereotypes, self-representation or shapeshifting through fashion, while other artists address notions of race, class, objectification, pleasure or desire. Many artworks in the show also allude to aspects of vulnerability, empowerment, kinship, community building or humans’ relationship with the environment.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex (1949): ‘One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one’. In Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler stated: ‘How can one become a woman if one wasn’t a woman all along? And who is this “one” who does the becoming?’

Furthermore, Annamarie Jagose declared in Queer Theory (1996): ‘Queer is always an identity under construction, a site of permanent becoming.’ The exhibition Contested Bodies highlights this constant state of becoming, acknowledging gender as a performative action that proliferates beyond the boundaries of the apparent binary of sex as well as the dominant heterosexual matrix.

4

This exhibition – like the Marcelle Joseph and GIRLPOWER Collections where all the artworks on display in the gallery come from – attempts to create a space where each artist has the political agency to wrest their own power to perform gender in a way that feels right to them, their kin and their wider community. In Butler’s words, ‘the culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its “natural” past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities.’

Contested Bodies constitutes a resistance to the normative relations between sex, gender and desire which demand exclusionary heteronormative binaries. These binaries date back to Aristotle’s Metaphysics where he sets out a table of opposites that include: one/many, male/ female, straight/curved, light/dark, good/bad. French author, philosopher and feminist theorist Monique Wittig concludes that ‘everything that was “good” belonged to the series of the One (the Being). Everything that was “many” (different) belonged to the series of the “bad”, assimilated to nonbeing.’ Therefore, the One – who from that point in history to today was never dislodged from their position of dominance in society – is the good, straight, light male, while the non-Being represents the female, the curved (read as queer), the dark, the bad. A way to destroy these categories and end the domination of the One over the Other may come from queer theory for its opposition to fixed, natural or innate identities – its fluidity and resistance to definition.

Agreeing with E. K Sedgwick, this exhibition proves how identity cannot be ‘organise[d] into a seamless and univocal whole;’ instead, it is multivalent, multivocal and intersectional.

Contested Bodies fractures and intersects discourses, from feminist and queer theories to postcolonial studies, criss-crosses the lines of identification and desire, and attempts to eliminate gender, sexual and racial hierarchies all together in order to recognise every person’s humanity, not just those ‘universal’ bodies that Aristotle considered the ‘One’. Anybody who has felt the pain of being forced to operate from the periphery due to their gender, race, sexual orientation, disability or class is someone and part of the One as One cannot be divided. In this exhibition, previously marginalised voices are sounding their clarion calls for subjectivity, cultural legitimacy and political viability.

Dr Laura Claveria is the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery.

Marcelle Joseph is an independent curator, collector and manager of both the Marcelle Joseph Collection and the collecting partnership GIRLPOWER Collection.

5

CONTESTED BODIES Ruth Holliday and Jessica Martin

This Contested Bodies exhibition opens at a crucial moment. We are writing in the wake of the June 2023 stabbing of a lecturer and two of their students at the University of Waterloo in Canada – a hate crime, deliberately targeted to close down discussion of the social construction of gender and sex. In Hungary, Viktor Orban closed Gender Studies departments in 2018, forcing the relocation of the Central European University to Vienna. Well, patriarchs have always opposed feminism. But now Gender Studies has new attackers, some of whom call themselves feminist (the Gender Critical Feminist Movement) and have very powerful, well-funded allies.

Transphobic commitments to rigid biological binaries have forged new coalitions between ‘feminists’ and global opponents of ‘gender ideology’ including authoritarian regimes and far-right extremists. What could possibly have prompted attacks against the very departments that teach feminism by ‘feminists’? And how have these ‘feminists’ found themselves building alliances with those who fund assaults on reproductive justice and LGBTQI+ rights? Well, it appears that changing gender roles is good, but changing gendered bodies is just going ‘too far’. Bodies are (bitterly) contested.

For the longest time feminists have argued that ‘women’ are socially constructed by men through the ‘male gaze’ in film and media, and through men’s control of language in institutions like sport, education, law and medicine which limit, omit or represent women only through men’s eyes. Since industrialization and urbanization, Western societies have expected women and men to occupy separate spheres – the domestic, to which the (obedient, white, middle-class) wife belonged and to which her moral and caring nature was ideally suited; and the public space of work and politics which required the reason ‘naturally’ possessed by (straight, white, middle-class) men who were bread-winners and decision-makers for their families. Many women were excluded from these idealized representations – non-mothers, lesbians and other queer women, working-class women, Black women. When African American enslaved woman Sojourner Truth addressed white, middle-class women at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in 1851, she had to ask ‘Ain’t I a woman?’, because her tough, muscular, labouring, black body was not seen as properly female. These campaigners wanted to win power on men’s terms,

6

rather than extending solidarity to their (‘unrespectable’) black and working-class sisters.

Thus, narrow rights were won but limiting patriarchal definitions of women’s capabilities remained largely intact, despite centuries of high achieving, adventurous or swashbuckling men being revealed – often on their deathbeds – to have had female bodies all along. And, when Leeds hero Beryl Burton beat all male competitors in the UK 25-mile cycling time trial in 1963, the governing body set about creating separate men’s and women’s races. What a woman is has therefore been contested from the start.

Women were declared naturally ‘different but equal’. But feminists began to notice that every ‘difference’ from the male norm was marked negatively in a binary pair. Men were dominant, strong, independent, rational, productive, protective, contained and women submissive, weak, emotional, reproductive, in need of protection and leaky. Heterosexuality was a match (made in heaven) of different but complementary natures; butch-femme lesbian couples a poor-quality copy by unnatural bodies that failed in their proper development.

So, feminists were left with a problem: how do we define women’s nature without drawing on men’s definitions of us? A search for the universal feminist subject beyond masculine thought and language began. What was the ‘essence’ of a ‘woman’?

Initially failing to break free of masculine constructions, feminists defined motherhood as woman’s essence, albeit revaluing the maternal characteristics that made her as ‘other’ (or even monstrous/abject) to patriarchy. Plato claimed that women create only ‘matter’ (bodies/babies) whilst men are the real creators of art and ideas (mind) which form ‘matter’ into manhood, linking men to culture and women to nature for centuries. In the 1960s and 1970s, Second Wave Feminists embraced the Earth Mother and the Goddess. However, these definitions excluded women who could not have/did not want children and tied women only to motherhood when lower birth-rates meant maternity was taking up less and less of women’s lives. In addition, some of this feminism failed to engage with the deliberate limiting of working-class, Black and disabled women’s fertility through forced sterilization or covert contraception trials. Donna Haraway’s declaration ‘I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess!’ was a direct challenge to these exclusive categorizations, and invoked women working in the tech industry, imploring feminists not to leave technology to masculine fantasies.1 Another proponent of ‘manhood’ as the source of identity was Freud, who claimed gender emerged from the presence or absence of a penis (phallus) and the power that it connoted in

7

nineteenth-century Vienna. French feminists drew on philosophy and psychoanalysis to explore girls’ continued connection to the mothers, which boys were forced to split from in order to secure their masculinity. Women, they argued, maintain interdependence with others and this is good for social relations and bad for war and conflict. Others, such as Hélène Cixoux and Luce Irigaray undid Oedipus by foregrounding the vagina and clitoris rather than dismissing it as ‘lack’ or ‘immature sexuality’. They claimed men’s phallogocentric writing – which used men’s words and grammar to describe the world – was only one potential form. Meanwhile women’s multiple, constantly in-contact and diffuse sexuality produced a different subjectivity and style of writing – écriture féminine. This writing may be circular, meandering or effusive rather than technical and straight to the point, just like women’s sexuality. They urged women to intervene in writing, to uncover their subordinated and subaltern knowledge, to make their presence felt and refuse to be defined or constrained by men.

These feminists rejected cultural constructions of women’s biological limitations, for example Cixoux claims ‘sexual opposition, which has always worked for man’s profit … is only historical-cultural limit.’2 However, at other points they draw on uniquely masculine or feminine essences that all men or all women share. For these feminists, women’s bodies were both source and expression of female identity, the inner psyche expressed through the body, except where that body was limited by men’s culture. However, in 1979 Foucault demonstrated how the identities of prisoners, soldiers, factory workers and students were disciplined through the management of bodies in space into willing compliance with restrictive social norms, and how these norms – produced through specialist discourses – became part of everyone’s self-definition. Heterosexuality, for instance, is not derived from ‘normal development’ of the psyche within the family as Freud claimed, but rather the powerful norm of heterosexuality colonizes the psyche and is enforced through a series of social rewards and punishments.

Even pleasure is socially constructed. There is no ‘essence’ of the body beyond the pre-existing language through which we come to know it and the identity it performs. For Elizabeth Grosz, then, the body is like a mobius strip – an outward expression of the inner self in which the ‘inner’ (psyche) is already constituted by the ‘outside’ (culture).

As Judith Butler explains in her book Gender Trouble, this comes together in the ‘heterosexual matrix’ – central to Western metaphysics – in which binary models of sex and gender constitute our binary sexuality.3 According to this model, female bodies develop feminine gender (in accordance with external norms), which in turn creates desire for the other

8

male/masculine in normative sexuality. Those with female bodies who develop masculine gender identities and desire for women have failed in their normal development and, for many sexologists, are in need of a ‘cure’. Against this, Butler argues that powerful actors, such as national governments, seeking ‘healthy’ populations (workforces) have made the heterosexual family ‘compulsory’ through rewards for marriage and childbearing, defining anything else as perverse. To become intelligible, heterosexuality requires two opposite sexes and genders and is itself opposed in a binary model to its opposite – ‘unreproductive’ homosexuality. For Butler, binary sex is therefore the product of the gender discourse of heterosexuality, which in turn must be constantly and repetitively performed in order to appear ‘natural’.

This logic saturates Western culture and has globally eviscerated not only the cacophony of permitted pre-colonial gender variation –Hijras in India, Fa’afafines in Samoa, Kathoeys in Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, for instance – but also the experiences of people with intersexed and other non-conforming bodies. Donna Haraway and Thomas Lacqueur pointed out that how bodies are seen depends on who is doing the seeing (usually middle-class white men), and that sex and sexuality are seen very differently by scientists in different epochs, even when looking at the same bodies. Drawing out the (sometimes greater) physical differences within and not just between sexes, Anne Fausto-Sterling argued that ‘five sexes are not enough’ and questioned why we insist on only two ‘opposites’. The psyche, Butler argued, massively exceeds the discourses through which sex, gender and sexuality are made into only two ‘opposite’ positions which must be constantly and repetitively performed in ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, giving the illusion of nature. After Gender Trouble, sexuality was ‘Queered’: this former term of abuse – levelled against the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, polyamorous, butch-femme, BDSM communities that fought police in the street in Greenwich Village after a raid on the Stonewall Inn in June 1969, and that collectively fought AIDS discourse – started to be used to collectively reclaim LGBTQI+ rights. The current moment of non-binary and trans identities reflects a subsequent queering of ‘biological’ sex.

However, such rights are once again under attack and contestations rollback bitterly fought-for bodily autonomies, reminding us that progress is never a linear march towards increasingly liberal democracy. As inequality skyrockets and neoliberal austerity policies bite around the world, they have created anger, self-preservation and jealousy. This anger has often been levelled at those granted recognition through identity politics in the absence of redistributive justice. And sharp intergenerational unfairness has seen those who benefited from cheap

9

housing, robust public services and anti-discrimination policies pull up the drawbridge leaving younger generations facing precarity and climate catastrophe. All bodies reach their limit at 50 degrees Celsius.

Responsibilization and deregulation have created a society in which bodies are constantly put at risk from polluted air and water, or overwork and toxic and competitive social relations which individuals must navigate. In risk societies anxiety is the normal state of being. The far-right feeds on anxiety, orienting visceral distress towards conspiracies and invisible and inexplicable subterranean regimes of power. In this world, the most excluded and abject – the transwoman or the refugee – return as threats to our (whose?) way of life, absorbing the resources that in reality the state no longer provides. The logic of extraction is threaded through both corporations who use up and exhaust our human vitality for profit, and Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists who extract the language of feminism to powerfully exclude and abject trans bodies. This manifests, for instance, around starved institutions such as the NHS, no longer equipped to provide adequate care to vulnerable trans people. When rolling back the state, vulnerable and marginalised groups such as the LGBTQI+ community make the easiest targets for cuts.

But what of resistance? Feminists continue to demand the space for forging new solidarities and organising without reproducing violent hierarchies and binaries. Organizations such as Sisters Uncut mobilise against brutal austerity regimes and their disproportionate impact on black and working-class women and trans people. They fight against patriarchal violence and police brutality and for trans liberation, sex worker rights and reproductive autonomy. Such struggles intersect and so should our resistance efforts. This year trans people stood on UK picket lines with striking public sector workers, showing solidarity whilst educating junior doctors and teachers on trans care and expression. These echoes of previous solidarities, such as ‘pits and perverts’ fundraisers organised by Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners activists in 1984–5, teach us that struggles for equality are never complete and that bodies resisting their proper place are a vital component, as this Contested Bodies exhibition shows.

Ruth Holliday is Professor of Gender and Culture and Jessica Martin is Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy. They both work at the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds.

KIRA FREIJE On the Underside of her Breath, 2019. ©The Artist

10

Donna Haraway (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge.

Hélène Cixous (1976) Cohen, Keith; Cohen, Paula (trans.) The Laugh of the Medusa, Signs, 1 (4): 875–893, p. 883.

3.

Judith Butler (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York; London: Routledge, 2007.

1.

2.

11

DUBIOUS EMBODIMENT, DOING GENDER AND FEMINIST READINGS Elspeth Mitchell

In 1987, lesbian feminist film theorist Teresa de Lauretis theorised gender as a technology.1 Gender, she said, is a product and process of a number of social and representational technologies. Gender is a representation (which is not to say it does not have material effects) and at the same time the representation of gender is its construction. In other words, representations make gender just as much as they represent it to us in the traditional sense.

The brilliance of this theory is that de Lauretis shows us how gender pre-exists, culturally informs and impinges on us, but as a diverse process of different technologies there maintains a space for its reworking. It is not fixed or essential. We have the capacity to refuse and transform it.

What is the place of art in this? It is crucial to understand that art is not simply the representation of gender, it does not just show us or reflect a picture of gender. Art does gender (and also undoes it at the same time). By this I mean, art makes gender as much as gender makes art. Neither are fixed, stable or essential despite what certain debates try to put forth.

This active notion of gender and art is particularly significant given histories of Western art.

Teresa de Lauretis maintained: ‘it can be said that all of Western Art and high culture is the engraving of the history of that [gender] construction.’2 Here she means that within art and cultural practices we can discern the making and remaking of gender in its historically and culturally situated specificity.

In Contested Bodies, a show about how gender and art refuse and transform expectations of bodies, desire and representation, we find a rich and diverse articulation of this idea. In the new commissioned work by British textile artist Tiegan Handley, for instance, the refusal of gender is writ large in vertical banners hung strikingly between the browns and creams of the Greek revival style columns of the Parkinson Court at the University of Leeds. The statement we read on the banners, ‘my self is not held in this flesh’, attests to the abjection of certain kinds

12

of bodies. Also, in the statement’s refusal of flesh as a limit, it directs us towards an expanded notion of bodily life and selfhood. The colours – pink, blue and purple – root the artwork in the flags and banners for trans rights and queer pride. The artwork plays on a sense of place and displacement in the University institution, mimicking both the banners hung for decorative or marketing purposes in this space and the textile protest banners of the movements for women’s liberation and gay civil rights, which would usually appear on the streets. These banners are a sign of visibility and a marker of protest for trans people who are not often afforded space, acceptance and care to exist in their own bodies within neoliberal, heterocratic and white patriarchal institutions.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, the photo collage C.R.E.A.M (2017) by Barbadian-Scottish artist Alberta Whittle brings into view another perspective on gender and the body. A sparkling, digitally-collaged image layers huge coconuts, gold chains, coins and bank notes behind a deeply blue skinned woman. The woman wears snakes as hair and is adorned with a garland of bananas. She sits facing the viewer in a comfortable, deep squat revealing a yoni mudra, or womb gesture, opening towards us. Her body is in full view in the centre of the frame, but around her are the tokens of colonial history (money exchanged for people made to be property) and the icons of the future (the mythic snake hair and deep-seated powerful woman).

Here, the coloniality of gender, a concept developed by Argentinian feminist philosopher María Lugones, is instructive.3 For me, Lugones’ writing is important because she insists that we cannot accept a global, Eurocentric and capitalist understanding of what gender is about.

Gender may be performative, an iterative fiction and social relation with material consequences, but it is also a colonial concept. Writing on the coloniality of gender, Lugones identifies what she calls a modern/colonial gender system through which to consider the dehumanising and racialising work that gender performed in the colonial context. ‘Man’ and ‘woman’ presuppose the acknowledgement of one’s humanity and a supported freedom (to be enslaved is to not count in this context). Without an understanding of how gender comes to be racialised through such colonial relationships of power, we end up with categories of analysis (gender, man, woman) which obscure as much as they claim to reveal. Gender is always a racialised concept.

Returning to C.R.E.A.M, Whittle’s Afrofuturist image presents a vibrant mythic figure who is both ‘woman’ and reaches beyond the concept’s colonial limits. A new woman? The Medusan hair hints at ‘woman’ conjured as monstrous figure and icon of masculinised psychic anxieties.

13

At the same time, she is a trans-species afro-diasporic heroine. Why be human when this universalised colonial framing is such a limit? She is joyously otherworldly, spiritually-oriented and of the non-human or more-than-human future.

A critique of human exceptionalism and universalised subjectivity also frames the work of Italian artist Agnes Questionmark. In Sometimes I Feel Like a Fish (2020) a cell-like cavity is surrounded by a pink-tentacled sea anemone, a form that also resembles a uterus gone awry, or a cell with delicate tendril-like proteins. Inside this pink form is a human figure curled into a foetal position suspended in fluid and looking out at us from her amniotic sac. This figure, however, is an adult, not a foetus. One racialised as white and with some allusions to traditional femininity in her soft features and brown hair floating gently in the liquid. It is an image both tender and beautiful in the soft colours and balance of forms, but also deeply uncanny in its rendering of such strange forms holding bodily life.

trans-species embodiment presented in Sometimes I Feel Like a Fish feels both natural and wonderfully unnatural in its vision of nurtured hybrid becoming.

Sometimes I feel like a fish presents just one of a myriad of diverse and rich perspectives on embodiment in Contested Bodies. The works I have identified here, speak (amongst other things) to feminist questions of bodily autonomy, and the deep questioning and undoing of categories such as ‘individual’, ‘human’ or ‘woman’. Art is marked by gender and does gender by virtue of being part of culture, but the question of what gender is and does, and indeed what art is and does, remains for us to keep working on, while reimagining and interrogating through a critical feminist lens.

Elspeth Mitchell is a Lecturer at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds.

Liquid holds bodies, transgresses bodies and makes bodies. As the Marxist-feminist theorist Sophie Lewis reminds us, all humans (so far) in history have been manufactured underwater: in amniotic fluid.4 Furthermore, the process of this watery gestation confounds the boundaries of self and other. Though the articulation of two discrete selves (usually mother and baby) has been linguistically useful, the pre-born is distinctly part of those that grow them. This makes the notion of an individual highly dubious. What is more, for Lewis following the work of biologist Lynn Margulis, we are always already multiply pregnant with various organisms, bacteria, viruses and more. Where does the human stop and the bacteria begin? They are part of what makes us who we are and we are them. They even gestate us insofar as they provide some crucial developmental functions on our behalf. Thus, we have to recognise, that bodies are always leaky, parasitised, non-unitary and not-just-human. We are not the master of our own bodies, nor our identities, nor modes of existence.

In her work, Agnes Questionmark takes this chimeric design as an invitation for imagining trans-species becoming: a transgenesis. When Simone de Beauvoir put into print in 1949 that one is not born woman, woman is something one becomes, a door was left open to a diverse set of becomings to which we must pay attention.5 Can human concepts of sex and gender hold if we are no longer fixed by species? The title of the artwork also intimates space for change and transformation. To sometimes feel like a fish means sometimes you do not. This gesture towards ambiguity is important amid the fixing pressure of identity politics. Questionmark’s complicated

14

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Teresa de Lauretis (1987) Technologies of Gender. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Ibid, p.3.

María Lugones (2008) ‘The Coloniality of Gender’, Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise, Spring 2008, https://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/sites/globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/files/file-attachments/v2d2_Lugones.pdf.

Sophie Lewis (2017) ‘Amniotechnics’, The New Inquiry, January 2017, https://thenewinquiry.com/amniotechnics/ Simone de Beauvoir (2010) The Second Sex, trans. Borde & Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Vintage.

15

From left to right: ALBERTA WHITTLE C.R.E.A.M., 2017 AD MINOLITI Geo Queer Deco (Green), 2014

16

17

From left to right: MARTINE GUTIERREZ Body En Thrall, p112 from Indigenous Woman, 2018 AMBER PINKERTON Sabah & Aminat: Girls Next Door, 2020

18

19

From left to right: JONATHAN BALDOCK Mask II, 2018 ANNA PERACH Transformer, 2021 RICHARD MALONE Leap, 2022

20

21

ZAYN QAHTANI, Damned to the Ephemeral, 2022. ©The Artist

LISA-MARIE HARRIS, Looking Ready for It, 2023. ©The Artist

22 23 23

From left to right: SAELIA APARICIO Form and Function, 2021 CAROLINE WONG Alison, 2022 BORIS CAMACA Arthur, Paris, 8 August 2020, 2020 MARYAM EISLER Matador and Minotaur, 2019

24

25 25

Back wall (from left to right):

Plinth (from left to right, top to bottom):

GRAY WIELEBINSKI Z, 2018

SANDRA LANE Walking Shoes (Yellow), 2017

COCO CRAMPTON Night is Also a Sun, 2017

TENANT OF CULTURE Puzzlecut Boot Various, 2021

LEO COSTELLOE, Woven Copper Underwear, 2019

LINDSEY MENDICK I Don’t Deserve Nice Things, 2019

ZADIE XA, Ice Caps + Frozen Jewels/Roughcut Diamonds and Faux Mink Space Suits, 2016

PALOMA PROUDFOOT The Union of a Human Foot and a Shoe is Actually a Monstrous Custom, 2019

JALA WAHID, Burn Us Harder into Halparkeh, 2019

26

27 27

From top to bottom, left to right: SAM KEELAN Rhinestone Cowboy, 2021 LARRY ACHIAMPONG Glyth Series 1 #4, 2013 JAKOB LENA KNEBL Pablo, 2017 NEL AERTS Self-Portrait, 2016 ALICIA REYES MCNAMARA Mama, 2020 PENNY GORING Amelia Has No Faith in Poetry, 2017 EILEEN COOPER Daphnae (as part of Wildwood Series 1), 2014 RITHIKA PANDEY The Ancestress Emerges from a Sea of Milk that was Once My Home, 2021 NEIL HAAS, Genet, 2019 PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA Studio (OX5A4983), 2020

28

29

From left to right: ALEXI MARSHALL, What is a Young Man to Do?, 2017 ROSE NESTLER, Spinner, 2021 REBECCA ACKROYD, We Have Your Children, 2017

30

31

From left to right: SOLA OLULODE Hands in the Air If You Think You’re Peng, 2017 JESSIE MAKINSON Spiral Bound, 2017 ALICIA REYES MCNAMARA A River near a River, 2021

32

33

From left to right: DEVLIN SHEA Tight Fit, 2019 PAUL KINDERSLEY Looking, 2020 SIN WAI KIN, Narrative Reflections on Looking, Part One: She Was More Than the Sum of my Parts, 2016 AGNES QUESTIONMARK, Sometimes I Feel Like a Fish, 2020 JESSE DARLING Bust, 2014

Following page: TIEGAN HANDLEY my self is not held in this flesh, 2023, quilt made from reclaimed textiles.

Commissioned by the University of Leeds. ©The Artist

34

35

LIST OF ARTWORKS ACHIAMPONG, Larry, Glyth Series 1 #4, 2013, archival C-type print.

KEELAN, Sam, Rhinestone Cowboy, 2021, inkjet print on archival photographic paper.

PROUDFOOT, Paloma, Glover, 2018, glazed porcelain.

ACKROYD, Rebecca, We Have Your Children, 2017, photographic print.

KINDERSLEY, Paul, Looking, 2020, watercolour on paper.

AERTS, Nel, Self-Portrait, 2016, colouring pencil and felt-tip pen on inkjet print. Courtesy of the GIRLPOWER Collection.

KNEBL, Jakob Lena, Pablo, 2017, C-type print mounted on Dibond. Courtesy of the GIRLPOWER Collection.

QAHTANI, Zayn, Damned to the Ephemeral, 2022, crystal pigments, coloured pencil, watercolour, soft pastel, gansai, chrome gilt polylactide, abalone, Baltic birch.

APARICIO, Saelia, Form and Function, 2021, ink on 300 gsm cotton paper.

LANE, Sandra, Walking Shoes (Yellow), 2017, glazed ceramic.

BALDOCK, Jonathan, Mask II, 2018, glazed ceramic.

MAKINSON, Jessie, Spiral Bound, 2017, oil and pigment on canvas.

REYES McNamara, Alicia, A River near a River, 2021, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the GIRLPOWER Collection.

CAMACA, Boris, Arthur, Paris, 8 August 2020, 2020, inkjet on Baryta paper, custom aluminium and wooden frame, silicone.

MALONE, Richard, Leap, 2022, bent steel, canvas, cotton thread, jersey, plyboard plinth.

REYES McNamara, Alicia, Mama, 2020, pastel and coloured pencil on coloured paper.

MARSHALL, Alexi, What is a Young Man to Do?, 2017, mixed media on textile.

SHEA, Devlin, Tight Fit, 2019, risograph print on Olin natural white paper.

MENDICK, Lindsey, I Don’t Deserve Nice Things, 2019, glazed ceramic. Courtesy of the GIRLPOWER Collection.

SIN, Wai Kin, Narrative Reflections on Looking, Part One: She Was More Than the Sum of my Parts, 2016, HD single-channel video. Duration 3:36.

MINOLITI, Ad, Geo Queer Deco (Green), 2014, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the GIRLPOWER Collection.

TENANT OF CULTURE, Puzzlecut Boot Various, 2021, recycled shoe lining, belt, labels, padding, shoe last, glue, thread.

SEPUYA, Paul Mpagi, Studio (OX5A4983), 2020, digital print.

WAHID, Jala, Burn Us Harder into Halparkeh, 2019, jesmonite, fibreglass, mica. Courtesy of the GIRLPOWER Collection.

COOPER, Eileen, Daphnae (as part of Wildwood Series 1), 2014, linocut on paper.

COSTELLOE, Leo, Woven Copper Underwear, 2019, woven copper and tin string.

CRAMPTON, Coco, Night is Also a Sun, 2017, merino wool, glazed ceramic.

DARLING, Jesse, Bust, 2014, steel, plastic, bungee cord.

EISLER, Maryam, Matador and Minotaur, 2019, digital print on Hahnemühle archival cotton fibre paper.

FREIJE, Kira, On the Underside of her Breath, 2019, steel, cast aluminium, fur.

GORING, Penny, Amelia Has No Faith in Poetry, 2017, felt tip on paper.

GUTIERREZ, Martine, Body En Thrall, p112 from Indigenous Woman, 2018, C-type print mounted on Sintra.

HAAS, Neil, Genet, 2019, watercolour and pencil on ceramic tile.

HARRIS, Lisa-Marie, Looking Ready for It, 2023, calabash, lacquer, archival leather and reclaimed steel intercom.

36

NESTLER, Rose, Spinner, 2021, foam, wood, staples, velvet, thread, fabric, wind-up clock.

OLULODE, Sola, Hands in the Air If You Think You’re Peng, 2017, oil, pastel and charcoal on canvas.

PANDEY, Rithika, The Ancestress Emerges from a Sea of Milk that was Once My Home, 2021, acrylic and gouache on canvas.

PERACH, Anna, Transformer, 2021, tufted wool, wooden frame, metal wire.

PINKERTON, Amber, Sabah & Aminat: Girls Next Door, 2020, digital C-type print. Courtesy of the GIRLPOWER Collection.

PROUDFOOT, Paloma, The Union of a Human Foot and a Shoe is Actually a Monstrous Custom, 2019, glazed ceramic. Courtesy of the GIRLPOWER Collection.

QUESTIONMARK, Agnes, Sometimes I Feel Like a Fish, 2020, C-type print on paper.

WHITTLE, Alberta, C.R.E.A.M., 2017, C-type digital collage, Diasec mounted on aluminium.

Courtesy of the GIRLPOWER Collection.

WIELEBINSKI, Gray, Z, 2018, hand sewn leather, hand dyed fur, jersey, plastic, chest protector, cowboy boots, sports cup.

WONG, Caroline, Alison, 2022, oil, oil pastel and acrylic on canvas.

XA, Zadie, Ice Caps + Frozen Jewels/Roughcut Diamonds and Faux Mink Space Suits, 2016, bleach, machine and hand stitched fabric, bamboo. Courtesy of the GIRLPOWER Collection.

All courtesy of the Marcelle Joseph Collection unless otherwise stated.

CONTESTED BODIES First published in 2023 on the occasion of the exhibition Contested Bodies The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery 25 October 2023 – 6 April 2024 Co-curated by Marcelle Joseph and Dr Laura Claveria The moral rights of the authors have been asserted © The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, except where otherwise stated ISBN-13 978-1-874331-69-8 EAN: 9781874331698 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the permission of the copyright owners and of the publishers.

To the best of our knowledge, the list of exhibited artworks is accurate at the time of printing.

The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery University of Leeds Parkinson Building Woodhouse Lane Leeds LS2 9JT Designed by RachelO StudiO Printed on 100% recycled paper Cover: Alberta Whittle, C.R.E.A.M., 2017 (detail). © Alberta Whittle. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage.

Courtesy of the Artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow 2023.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We are deeply grateful to Marcelle Joseph, all the participating artists, their studios and galleries, Rachel Oliver, Alex Santos, Tony Rae, Karanjit Panesar, Layla Bloom, Fred Pepper, Laura Millward, Laura Beare, Laura Wilson, Claire Evans, Lauren Hollowday, Cat Lane, Sophia Lambert, Florence Finn, Ellen Dutton, Abigail Boon, Lane Osborne, Katherine Tiller, Rebecca Higgins, Laura Smith, Qona Wright, Helen Price, Maisy Stant, Neema Stephenson, Jenny Haynes, Josh Sendall, and University Librarian and Keeper of the Brotherton Collection, Masud Khokhar.