transfeminisms Chapter IV:
Care and Kinship

12 September – 26 October 2024
Preview: Thursday 12 September, 6–8:30pm

Press Release

Mimosa House presents the fourth chapter of transfeminisms, a major survey touring exhibition, that brings to light a multiplicity of urgent, pressing and ongoing issues faced by women, queer and trans people across the globe. The fourth chapter will feature works by Sonia Boyce, Marcia Harvey Isaksson, Lubaina Himid, Gulnur Mukazhanova, SaVĀge K'lub and Buhlebezwe Siwani.

Care and Kinship celebrates community, collective ritual, and ancestors. Artists work across various media including felt and weaving, film and sound, language and acts of collective making. Drawing on the sacred interconnectedness, the exhibition features acts of resilience, spirituality, and healing.

Unfolding over five chapters, transfeminisms outlines strategies of resistance through propositions of collective action, care and radical imagination, in order to generate a more equitable future. The exhibition explores the lineage of feminist art practices by facilitating dialogue between emerging and more established artists.

The title transfeminisms is deliberately provocative. The prefix “trans” implies ‘across, beyond, through, on the other side of’; while the ‘s’ in ‘feminisms’ recognises the innumerable definitions of feminism worldwide. Our intention is for transfeminisms to be understood within an inclusive and decolonial context– one that takes us across feminisms and encompasses various ‘trans’ possibilities, such as: transcultural, transcontinental, transgender, transformative, transgressive, transitory, translucent, transparent, transaction, translation, transfusion, transmission, transmutation.

Sonia Boyce’s Devotional Wallpaper and Placards series (2008-2022) is a long-term project that emerged from a collaboration with the Liverpool Black Sisters collective in 1999. Boyce invited the participants to recall the first record they ever bought and to name a Black British female singer. Realising the erasure of these performers, the artist proceeded to create a collective historical mapping reinscribing their names within Britain’s and the world’s music histories. The resulting wallpaper and placards not only bring them back to our memory, they also speak to the Black female sonic presence forming part of personal and collective existence beyond Black life and histories.

In the video piece Matriarchs, Myths + Legends, 2021 Marcia Harvey Isaksson pays tribute to her female ancestors. Seven women whose fates span over six generations in her family, women who have had a crucial impact on her own life and artistic development. By exploring her own family history and telling stories that link past events with today’s state of affairs, she highlights the interconnectedness of everything - what happened to her ancestors and her home region back then has affected not only her but the whole world. In this exhibition, through weaving, photography and film, the audience is introduced to the fate of Charwe Nyakasikana Nehanda, a Zimbabwean heroine and spirit medium who played a key role in the first war of independence against the British in the late 19th century.

Lubaina Himid will present a specially curated installation showcasing rarely seen elements of the thinking process and creative practice behind the making of some of her most famous works, including inspirations drawn from women’s literature and her caring for Black creativity which notably materialised through the Making Histories Visible project. The installation will also engage in a dialogue with other works from this chapter conveying the memory of female ancestors embedded within textile pieces and motifs.

Gulnur Mukazhanova works in tactile mediums, particularly fabrics and traditional Kazakh felt. This material, deeply significant to Kazakh nomadic culture, was historically used in clothing, bedding, and homes (yurts), symbolising a sacred connection between Mother Earth and Sky. Mukazhanova transforms the soft wool into solid felt sculptures moulded from her own face and body, representing both a physical and psychological journey, and showcasing her deep connection to the material.

Rosanna Raymond with her son Salvador Brown and collaborator Lyall Hakaraia are all part of SaVĀge K’lub – a collective of artists from around the Moana Nui - Pacific. Their work Lalaga Toto Mai I Le Pō - Bloodlines Woven From The Night, 2024 is an immersive installation consisting of moving image, spoken words, sound and Moana Nui body centred practices that invites you to sit with your ancestors. A mediative process calling upon the Vā Body - a non-gendered body, a relational space where all ancestors are housed, to encapsulate art and ancestor’s past, present and future.

In the short film AmaHubo, 2018, Buhlebezwe Siwani interrogates the historical associations between African spiritual beliefs and cosmologies, and Christianity. Centering the role of land and black women (and their positionality) within spiritual practices and institutions, AmaHubo invites us to reflect deeply on the challenges of rootedness, devotion and healing in our society. Through this work Siwani brings into a space of visibility the resilient forms of knowledge and spirituality communally cultivated by women in her homeland.

Curators

Christine Eyene, Daria Khan, Jennifer McCabe and Maura Reilly

Assistant curators

Sandra Lam and Keshia Turley

Global Curatorial Advisors

Camille Auer, Giulia Casalini, Natasha Ginwala, Snejana Krasteva, Natalia Sielewicz, Gabriela Rangel, Lucía Sanromán, Olia Sosnovskaya, Stefanie Hessler, and Indira Ziyabek

transfeminisms is supported by 

Lubaina Himid Projects
British Council
Mondriaan Fund
The Ashley Family Foundation
Grange Hotels

transfeminisms exhibition circle 
Marcelle Joseph 
Muriel Salem 
Nayrouz Tatanaki

Mimosa House is supported by

Mimosa House patrons

Artists’ bios:

Dame Sonia Boyce DBE RA (b. 1962)

Dame Sonia Boyce DBE RA is an interdisciplinary artist and academic working across film, drawing, photography, print, sound, and installation. In 2022, she presented FEELING HER WAY for the British Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale for which she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. Boyce came to prominence in the early 1980s as a key figure in the burgeoning British Black Arts Movement with figurative pastel drawings and photo collages that addressed issues of race and gender in Britain. Since the 1990s, she has shifted significantly to embrace a social practice that invites improvisation, collaboration, movement, and sound with other people. Working across a range of media, her practice today is focused on questions of artistic authorship and cultural difference. In 2016, Boyce was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in London and in 2023, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Science in Boston. In 2014 she became a Professor at University of the Arts London, where she holds the inaugural Chair in Black Art & Design. In the 2024 King’s New Year Honours List, Boyce was awarded a Damehood. Her work is in many UK and international museum collections including TATE, London; Saastamoinen Foundation, Finland; Centre Pompidou, France and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, USA.

Devotional Series is presented courtesy of Middlesbrough Collection. Purchased by Contemporary Art Society through the Rapid Response Fund, 2020 and presented to MIMA, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, 2020

Marcia Harvey Isaksson (b.1975)

Originally from Zimbabwe, Marcia Harvey Isaksson is based in Stockholm and graduated from Beckmans College of Design in 2008 and has since worked as an exhibition designer and interior architect. In her artistic practice she uses weaving and other textile methods to investigate cultural and personal heritage, the transfer of knowledge over generations, and how narratives of the past effect the present and the future. She is interested in site-specific narratives, working often with a mix of media, from sculpture to performance. Harvey Isaksson is also the founder of Southnord, a platform whose purpose is to make space for black and Afro-Nordic artists. She previously ran Fiberspace (2015-2023), an arena for textile art, handicrafts and design.

Lubaina Himid CBE RA (b.1954)

Lubaina Himid CBE RA is an artist and educator living and working in Preston, United Kingdom. She studied Theatre Design at Wimbledon College of Art and went on to receive an MA in Cultural History from the Royal College of Art. A self-described “painter and a cultural activist” she rose to prominence in the 1980s as a pioneer of the British Black Arts Movement and a staunch advocate for the contributions of Black women to the visual arts. Himid received the Turner Prize in 2017 and was the subject of a major survey at Tate Modern, London, UK, in 2021-22. Other recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE (2023-24); Glyndebourne Opera Festival, East Sussex, UK (2023); Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland (2022); Hollybush Gardens, London, UK (2022, 2019, 2018, 2013); Tate Britain, London, UK (2019); Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, The Netherlands (2019); CAPC Bordeaux, France (2019); New Museum, New York (2019); Spike Island, Bristol, UK (2017); and Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, UK (2017). She is the 2024 recipient of the Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize, and was also awarded the Maria Lassnig Prize in 2023.

Gulnur Mukazhanova (b.1984)

Gulnur Mukazhanova was born in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, shortly before the end of the USSR. She studied at the Art Academy in Almaty and the Kunsthochschule in Berlin Weißensee. Central to the Mukazhanova’s practice is research into and a processing of kazakh society, where the artist experienced the soviet collapse and subsequent capitalist embrace as two abrupt transitions and migrating orders. Since emigrating to Berlin, she has honed her observation on post-nomadic identities. Though the term “nomad” today is often used in reference to the digital nomad living in alienation or isolation from communities, the artist’s oeuvre grasps the tension between the rooted and unrooted by observing visual practices, like textile traditions, developed in nomadic communities in kazakhstan. Her works become a reflection of Kazakh society, critically illuminating the tensions between the individual, the post nomadic developed identity, and the alienation through global information and media society.

SaVĀge K'lub

The SaVĀge K'lub was first conceived by artist and scholar Rosanna Raymond in 2010 and is named in reference to a historical gentleman's club first established in London in the nineteenth century. The capitalization of VĀ in the middle of the word privileges the Samoan notion of vā - relational space between people and things. Vā is one of the founding principles ensuring Moana-based creative practices and protocols are at the centre of their collective practice.

The SaVĀge K’lub come together to celebrate all forms of art and culture, collaborating to acti.VĀ.te people and things. It is now a multi-disciplinary vehicle built to explore ideas of hospitality, culture and identity. The SaVĀge K’lub have participated in large-scale research-based art projects in Australia, Aotearoa NZ, UK and Hawaii . Their most recent project Te Paepae Aora’i – A Place Where The Gods Will Not be Fooled curated by Raymond currently sits in the National Gallery of Australia. 

Rosanna Raymond (b. 1967)

Born and based in Tāmaki Makaurau [Auckland], Aotearoa New Zealand, Sistar S’pacific aka Rosanna Raymond activities have made her a notable producer of and commentator on contemporary Moana culture in Aotearoa New Zealand, the U.K., Australia and the USA. A long-standing member of the art collective the Pacific Sisters and a founding member and life time President of the SaVĀge K’lub, her body centered practices include working within museums and higher education institutions as a researcher, curator, artist, performer, guest speaker, poet, and workshop leader. A ‘Tusitala’ (a teller of tales) at heart her art practice takes a variety of forms ranging from installation works, spoken words and body adornment, fusing traditional pacific practices with modern innovations and techniques.

Lyall Hakaraia (b. 1967)

Lyall Hakaraia was born in Kororareka [Russell], Aotearoa New Zealand (Māori, Tangata Whenua, Pākehā), an artistic polymath living in London whose work encompasses making, producing, directing, designing and curating. As an artist who is takatāpui, we continuously create ambitious work with progressive and often transgressive artists in the face of certain adversity. Recent works look to combine community, art and performance in the making of ritual and celebration as acts of identity, belonging and culture through remembrance, participation and sharing. We always look to make safe spaces for QTIPOC communities and to make their places of joy and hope. Lyall is the founder of Vogue Fabrics Dalston ( VFD CIC ) for many years the only QTIPOC independent owner-operator to run a late-night queer venue in London. We are a founding member of 'Faggamuffin' Hackney Carnival's QTIPOC Bloc Party, 'In*ter*is*land Collective ' the first Pacific arts collective in Europe and 'Black Trans Project' together with singer Neneh Cherry supporting creative Femmes of colour. We embrace all of our Pacific whakapapa and are guided by our Tupuna. We do not adhere to the colonial imposition of binary gender or imperial diminutives that have restricted the growth of our Moana peoples. 

Salvador Brown

Heir Apparent to the SaVĀge K’lub and Creative Director of PepeTuna Sound Studio. A seasoned player, producer, and maker of Taonga Pūoro—sound and instruments from around the Moana Nui—he has performed globally, collaborating with notable collectives such as the Pacific Sisters, In*ter*is*land Collective, and experimental sound artists Logo Puloto. Brown leverages his extensive knowledge of Taonga Pūoro, photography, and videography to create works that reimagine the sounds of the past in the present.

Buhlebezwe Siwani (b.1987)

Buhlebezwe Siwani works with performance, photography, sculpture and installation. Siwani’s work interrogates the patriarchal framing of the black female body and black female experience within the South African context. As an initiated Sangoma, a spiritual healer that works within the space of the death and the living, Siwani focused her artistic practice into rituality and the relationship between Christianity and African spirituality. Central to her work is her own body, which operates in multiple registers as subject, object, form, medium, material, language and site. Her work can be described, although not literally, as the documentation of a diverse set of performances, which are rendered through video, photography, sculpture, installation and works on paper. Each of her projects deals with the relationship between ancestral rituals and modern life, touching social and political topics, such as the female body, black communities, histories of colonisation and the paradoxes of our contemporary society, all seen through the filter of the artist’s own biography and experience. Buhlebezwe Siwani was born in Johannesburg, South Africa and currently lives and works between Cape Town and Amsterdam.