“It is not possible for girlhood to be represented wholly — girlhood is too vast and too individual an experience. We can only try to represent girlhood in ways that are varied and recognizable”
― Roxane Gay, ‘Bad Feminist’, 2014
‘Girlhood’ is an exhibition exploring the construction of female identity throughout childhood and adolescence.
Bringing teen spirit to FaB, the exhibition features playful approaches to feminism and curious engagement with gender constructs.
Curated by Jess Holtaway, submission is now closed girlhood@fringeartsbath.co.uk
Girls will be Girls, Tracy Sachwill, 2019
Girls will be Girls is an experimental documentary film, that retells girlhood stories, using archival footage and oral histories. The film studies the construction of female identity through childhood and adolescent experiences. Clips of archival footage were cut and edited from a range of archival footage from East Anglian Film Archive and other archival resources, juxtaposing with spoken audio. This dialogue was recorded during interviews with four mature women of different backgrounds, discussing their expectations and behaviours of girls growing into womanhood, looking at how they should act, speak, dress and conduct themselves. The film playfully explores the pressures to conform to certain behaviours and beliefs, covering appearance, school, friendships, relationships with boys and family and career opportunities.
Image © Tracy Sachwill
DE-PROJECTION, 2019-20, Laurie Joly
TO SEE THIS PERFORMANCE LIVE, VISIT ‘DE-PROJECTION’ ON SUNDAY MAY 24TH @ 17.30!
Originally considering the ancestral association between Earth and women in terms of fertility, DE-PROJECTION attempts to erase the gendered projections which contain women, from their early age, into biological functions of reproduction and lactation, and consequently assign them fixed roles in society.
Image © Laurie-Joly
perambulates, enne&moffa, 2020
enne&moffa's performance perambulates explores the darker notes of transitioning from girlhood to adulthood, questioning the darker notes of growing into a woman under pressure. The broken dialogue in the performance is taken from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, a controversial novel of a man's obsession for a thirteen-year-old girl. perambulates probes on the desires of some imposed on other unaware beings, the vulnerability of the playful age where curiosity can be twisted into flirting and innocence into lust.
Image © enne&moffa
GirlGAN, Lavoslava Benčić
“In the experimental art work GIRLGAN, I engaged critically with machine learning and AI technologies. Actually, I examined how the words "girl" and "muse" (and the textual descriptions that are close to the basic concept) are translated into the sequence of synthesized images. With the tool, AttnGAN I synthesized the details on different sub-regions of the images and I paid special attention to the description and selection of relevant words in natural language (English). Yet, we may admit that the results are unpredictable and synthesized images are unexpected if we compare generated images to the perception of the real "girls" in today's society.”
image © Lavoslava Benčić
Rituals, Andrea Bagdon, 2019
Rituals addresses the obsessive cultural programming of the female psyche. I look to the psychoanalytical theory of the abject to talk about uncomfortable yet familiar female narratives to attempt to fracture the symbolic ordering of womanhood. By using layered and uncomfortable representations of the domestic and the female form I intend to highlight this psychological trauma and disrupt the voyeuristic spectatorial inspection of the viewer.
Image © Andrea Bagdon
Lucia Lip, Wasted, 2017
The music video ‘Wasted’ by LUCIA LIP is a pure celebration of girlhood, calling to mind the sense of being in one’s room amongst the few things one has, revealing oneself with girlfriends. It captures aspects of sexuality, same sex curiosity; a selfie-generation naively enjoying filming one another.
I am not myself, Svetlana Ochkovskaya, 2019
Through performance in the full-body sculptural suit, Svetlana extends the boundaries of the figure, inverting a sense of identity. The masquerade helps her to create a new form of being, to enter a different reality and to change fiction of the self; to create space in which she can play out her desires and fears. She wants to express more than just the redundant function of a woman trapped by her domestic environment. Her work is projecting a woman's imagination and visions into the world, upon mundane reality.
Image © Svetlana Ochkovskaya
