Transfeminisms: The radical exhibitions reframing feminist art practices

In 2007, the Brooklyn Museum hosted an exhibition titled Global Feminisms which was dedicated to the feminist practices of artists worldwide. Curated by Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin, the show was widely appreciated for how it moved beyond a narrow, Western perspective of feminism. In the 16 years that followed, feminist discourse evolved significantly to includedebates on decolonisation and indigeneity, reproductive rights, climate activism and expansive perspectives on gender, among others.

An ongoing survey show at London’s Mimosa House, transfeminisms, curated by Reilly alongside Christine Eyene, Daria Khan and Jennifer McCabe, addresses these concerns with a similarly global outlook. “Maura Reilly wanted to work on an updated version of Global Feminisms and had the idea of calling the exhibition transfeminisms to emphasise the plurality of feminisms and ‘trans’ as a word that signifies inclusivity,” says co-curator and founding director of Mimosa House, Daria Khan. “This idea of inclusivity was our starting point and encompassed inclusivity in terms of geographies, genders, subject matter and languages.”

Split across five chapters, transfeminisms presented its first chapter in March and is preparing for Chapter V: Hidden Labours. According to Khan, the subjects of each chapter aren’t set in stone, noting how “it was more about highlighting specific themes that we wanted to facilitate a dialogue on, especially around the idea of resistance in the public and private sphere.” The curatorial team were especially invested in highlighting the complexity and nuances between feminist perspectives in Western countries and the global majority. They hoped to achieve this by platforming the works and practices of several international artists, most of whom are being exhibited in the UK for the first time.

Opening to the public on November 8, the last edition of transfeminisms – Chapter V: Hidden Labours – delves into the gendered and often invisible labour performed by women and the broader queer community. To celebrate the opening of this crucial final chapter, we chart the progress of transfeminisms below. 

The exhibition’s first chapter, Activism and Resistance (which ran from 8 March–20 April 2024), explored art as political protest, tackling the complexities of dissent in the public and private spheres. With themes spanning free speech, reproductive rights, and anti-colonial resistance, each piece captures responses to state violence and cultural repression. Exemplifying this curatorial impetus, Bahia Shehab’s “A Thousand Times No” was plastered over the gallery window in response to the genocide in Palestine. Expanding on an ongoing project that began in 2010, this work collected a thousand historical renditions of the Arabic letter “ال”, symbolising “No”, to echo the phrase: “No, and a thousand times no!” as a means to challenge state-sponsored violence. Works on display included, amongst others, large-scale photographs by Ada Pinkston that feature the artist performing in the vacant spaces where confederate monuments stood to address historical silences, Kyuri Jeon’s short film on the prenatal discrimination against girls in South Korea and Fatima Mazmouz’s H.EROS, Portraits of Moorish Women (2023) reconfiguring erotic postcards from the early 20th century in an attempt to reclaim the Orientalist gaze that has been cast on Arab women.

In the second part of transfeminisms – Chapter II: Radical Imagination (which ran from 15 May–29 June 2024) – the curators worked with artists who subverted icons through the lens of dystopian futurism, feminism, mythology and queer theories. The featured works confront religion, mythology and conspiracy by reimagining classic narratives to expose their inherent power dynamics. In the space, Martine Gutierrez included four photographs from her ANTI-ICON: APOKALYPSIS series, where she channels iconic heroines such as Aphrodite and Mary Magdalene into fierce, gender-defying idols, while Chiara Fumai’s video work critiques religious dogma and subsequent societal control. Other works on display included Juliana Huxtable’s mixed-media collages, Jesse Jones’ hanging sculpture “Thurible” (2024), Josèfa Ntjam’s film, which charts Cameroon’s independence struggles through real and imagined memoirs, and Naomi Rincón Gallardo’s film Heavy Blood (2018). This chapter served as both critique and reimagination, pushing the audience towards imagining a radical future that isn’t defined by gender, race or religion.

Chapter III: Fragile Archives (which ran from 5 July–17 August 2024) explored how histories and narratives survive outside institutional frameworks, from personal and family archives to photography and performance. The exhibition featured works by Victoria Cantons, Elsa James, Yuki Kihara, Myriam Omar Awadi, Irene Antonia Diane Reece and Agnes Questionmark, who investigated how non-traditional archives can confront historical narratives and the assumptions surrounding gender and identity. Omar Awadi, for instance, allowed visitors to revisit the Debe (a singing ceremony practised in the Comoro Islands where women would come together and sing about the injustices of the authorities) through her video work.

Ancestral connections and ritual practices were central to Chapter IV: Care and Kinship, the penultimate edition of transfeminisms (which ran from 12 September–26 October 2024). Across each artist’s offering, there was a sense of paying homage to the generations of feminists, artists and thinkers before us. This notion of ancestry and heritage materialised in Sonia Boyce’s “Devotional Wallpaper and Placards” (2008-2022), which honoured forgotten Black British female singers and reinserted them into global music histories and an immersive sound installation by SaVĀge K’lub (a collective of artists from around the Moana Nui) which invites the audience to sit and meditate with your ancestors, alongside the works of several other artists such as Marcia Harvey Isaksson, Lubaina Himid and Gulnur Mukazhanova.

The final chapter of Transfeminisms – Chapter V: Hidden Labours – which opens this week, unveils the labour of merely being visibly queer and questions the traditional narratives that shape LGBTQ+ history. These artists use performance, photography, and video to question gendered labour, resistance and visibility through a trans-feminist lens. This attempt to challenge mainstream queer+ representation can be seen in Cassils’ performance piece, “Becoming An Image”, which will be displayed at the gallery where the artist uses their body as both the medium and message to examine how marginalised bodies are constructed to reflect social expectations and state power.

Transfeminisms, Chapter V: Hidden Labours is running at Mimosa House, London, November 8–December 14, 2024)