Power for the People: Art, Protest, and the Archives of Activism

An initial foray into the Orchard Gallery’s archives presents an insight on how municipal galleries can navigate a complex network of organisational relationships within civic structures, in order to articulate a counter-hegemonic public art programme engaging with localised forms of protest. This is particularly framed by the peripheralised context of Derry and the broader artistic superstructure in Northern Ireland.

Orchard’s position within the apparatus of Derry City Council introduced certain priorities at the gallery’s outset, informed by the lack of local artistic infrastructure and tensions with the political core in Belfast. This aligned with Declan McGonagle’s socially engaged curatorial practice that sought to assert the validity of localised experience. Orchard could thus develop a public arts programme that openly challenged hegemonic detached forms, instead actively engaging political language in Derry to generate local discussion. This diverse programme engaged international artists, such as Barbara Kruger, and young local artists, including Richard Livingstone and the gallery’s own public art team. Orchard also had to strategically mediate shifting organisational processes and relations with Derry City Council over time, so as to maintain the momentum and articulation of its growing practice.

This presentation uses selected archival material to build upon contributions by Rachel Warriner, Liam Kelly, and Gabriel N. Gee towards conceptualising Orchard’s public art strategy in relation to civic structures. The documentary material is shown as both influenced by and actively constructing Orchard’s practice, presenting a small picture of how Orchard negotiated civic networks to productively develop localised cultural agency.

Ashab Ahmad is a second year PhD researcher at Ulster University, in collaboration with the Void Arts Centre in Derry. His PhD project investigates the relationship between Orchard and its documentary material, as a distinct archival form of organisational self-historicisation, in developing and preserving a counter-hegemonic practice that impacted Derry’s artistic ecosystem. He previously completed his undergraduate degree in Art History and masters degree in Museum and Gallery studies from the University of St Andrews, after which he worked as the Project Outreach Officer at the St Andrews Heritage Museum and Garden for two years.

Once one of Europe’s largest council housing complexes, the Aylesbury Estate in South London is currently undergoing phased demolition under Southwark Council’s regeneration programme. Against decades of media hostility and political scapegoating, in 2023, anti-gentrification activists organised a protest exhibition titled ‘Fight 4 Aylesbury’ inside tenant Aysen Dennis’s beloved home. Offering an alternative perspective of life on the Aylesbury, the exhibition challenged entrenched narratives of environmental determinism that successive governments have used to justify demolition as inevitable rather than a political decision.

Motivated by Rebecka Taves Sheffield’s Berlantian concept of ‘archive optimism’, and drawing on Michael Romyn’s oral history research, this paper explores the ambition to preserve material that traces a working-class community’s fight for safe and sustainable social housing in the face of state-led erasure. The research maps archival material held at the Bishopsgate Institute against the council’s demolition timeline. Ultimately, it argues that the physical exhibition and its emerging digital reconstruction function as disruptive tools, enabling tenants to reclaim representation of their lives and homes.

Rachel Ashenden is a freelance writer and editor based in Edinburgh. She is the Art Editor of The Skinny, a leading Scottish cultural magazine which champions activism and DIY creativity. There, Rachel priorities personal and political art writing, and serves as a mentor to emerging writers. She has delivered papers on Surrealism, Dada and decolonial curatorial practices at art history conferences at Birkbeck University, Oxford University, Glasgow University and Exeter University, respectively.

The UK Disability Arts movement encompasses a highly varied body of work across many media, produced by Disabled artists. It parallels, informs and comments on the struggle for Disabled people’s civil rights in the UK from 1981 to the present day. Many of its earliest practitioners are still part of this ‘school’ of art/artists. They and younger Disabled artists continue to produce works based on the lived experience of disability and its causes and outcomes as defined by the social model of Disability.

Since its inception in 2002, the National Disability Art Collection and Archive (NDACA) has collected, documented and preserved the Disability Arts movement’s works, though in recent years many mainstream museums and galleries have begun to assemble their own collections. Using NDACA and sculpture / assemblage made by Disabled artists as a focus, this panel discussion will explore Disabled people’s own representations of their experiences and concerns, how these works entered the wider public consciousness, and how they are viewed, reported, documented and preserved.

This will involve an examination of the relationship between Disability art and:

The fight for Civil rights for Disabled people
The blurred line between Art and activism
The often unacknowledged ideologically ableist message of some mainstream art
Sculpture and assemblage by Disabled artists in the public realm.

The talk will focus on sculptures by Tony Heaton while referencing works by Adam Reynolds, James Wear, Marc Quinn and introducing ‘Chip the Crip’.

Alex Cowan is Shape Arts project archivist and collections lead for the NHLF funded National Disability Arts Collection and Archive (NDACA) and the forthcoming National Disability Movement Archive and Collection (NDMAC), both based at Buckinghamshire New University in High Wycombe. He came to both projects after a 25+ year career as an archive producer, sourcing visual and audio material for TV documentaries, film and museum displays.

Colin Hambrook is a disabled editor, artist, and writer. He has worked in disability arts since the mid-1990s and established Disability Arts Online (DAO) in 2004. After editing DAO for 21 years, he is moving into a new role as Director of Heritage Projects.

Tony Heaton OBE is Chair of Shape Arts, an activist/artist and the originator of the NDACA – The National Disability Arts Collection and Archive project. He has exhibited nationally and internationally for over 25 years, including at 2024’s Venice Biennale. His work Gold Lamé was the first sculpture sited on the Liverpool Plinth in 2018 and Monument to the Unintended Performer, installed on the Big 4 outside Channel 4 TV in celebration of the 2012 London Paralympics.

Born in Glasgow in 1909, artist Helen Biggar was a sculptor, filmmaker, political organiser, and theatre designer whose socialist and pacifist beliefs deeply influenced her art. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art (1925-32), where she specialised in sculpture and formed numerous friendships and collaborations. Beyond Scotland her artwork and activism are largely unseen, arguably an impact of her diverse pursuits as well as her early passing and barriers faced because of her gender and disability

This paper will present a selection of Biggar’s artworks to convey how her anti-war politics propelled her art and organising forward, and how she responded to rising fascism in the 1930s and the Second World War (1939-45). Under discussion will be the agitprop film Hell Unltd 1936, made with film-maker Norman McLaren, and her documentary Challenge to Fascism: Glasgow’s May Day 1938. Her films will be contrasted with the humanist sentiment of her sculptures such as Mamie Biggar 1937 and Mother & Child 1947. Biggar’s commitment to collaborative working will be presented as a source of inspiration, counter-intuitive to the individualistic structures of art and art history.

In politically urgent times, activist practitioners such as Birmingham Film and Video Workshop, and curator Jenny Brownrigg, have sought to make Biggar’s practice visible through art works and exhibitions that drew on Scotland’s publicly accessible archives. My paper will seek to expand on how revisiting her work today, through the traces that remain, can act as inspiration, affirmation and agitation for contemporary artistic activism.

Cicely Farrer is a SGSAH-AHRC-funded PhD student undertaking a collaborative doctoral award with the School of Art History, University of St Andrews and the Glasgow School of Art Archives & Collections. Taking a trans-temporal approach, Cicely is researching histories of art, gender and activism through the question: How have the women of Glasgow School of Art performed acts of resistance in response to a global military industrial complex of the 20th and 21st century? The methodology uses an object-led approach to identify specific women and gender non-conforming artists affiliated with the GSA, who have engaged with peace and gender activism, focusing on their performative, playful and aesthetic approaches.

Since the 1990s, engaging public participants to constitute a collective for achieving political agendas has been considered a pivotal strategy in contemporary art practices. However, for those practices that involve computer and internet elements, the role of the collective is usually omitted. Within the archives and discourses of digital art, works are usually categorised for their technological specificity. The existence of a collective at best consists of an empty description – ‘collective’ or ‘participants’ and this is secondary to artists’ expertise, activist intentions and the novelty of the technology. This omission is highlighted by the contrast with contemporary participatory art discourse, which concerns activist art as well, but principally of the non-digital variety. Participatory art discourse foregrounds the power dynamics between artists and the collective in their artistic collaborations and thus enquires into their actual forms of politics and democracy.

This paper investigates whether the above omissions arise from the structural division between digital and non-digital categories in artistic archiving and discourse, and considers how this bias shapes our understanding of the political potential of digital activist art. This paper focuses on Floodnet 1998, a virtual sit-in in support of the Zapatista rebels in Mexico, and its corresponding archives and criticisms. Using these, this paper will examine the reasons for the omission of ‘the collectives’ in the work by interrogating the underpinned criterion of digital art discourse and comparing it with the contemporary participatory art discourse. This comparison demonstrates how diverging frameworks of evaluation engage different facets of politics. The paper further argues that the archival omission of collectives indicates a new imbalance in relation to digital labour. This imbalance becomes increasingly evident and urgent in a context where participatory practices have been bound with the digital and have been expanded across economy, politics and social domains.

Yang Feng is a PhD candidate in the History of Art program at the University of Leeds. Her doctoral research studies how the digital changes the ways of engaging and participating with/in art for and beyond humans. She is particularly interested in the evolving intersections between art and science, and the expansion of digital participation across multiple domains, which characterises today’s context. In examining this ever-changing contemporary landscape, in which the boundaries between artist and participant, human and non-human, art and science are increasingly blurred and distilled, she seeks to reconsider the roles of both art and the artist from the perspective of an art historian/critic.

Kirstie Gregory is the Research Coordinator at the Henry Moore Institute and a PhD candidate at Leeds Beckett University. She has a BA (Hons) from the Courtauld Institute of Art, a Post-Graduate Diploma from the University of Queensland and an MRes from the University of Huddersfield. In 2023 she completed an extended interview with Dame Phyllida Barlow for the British Library’s ongoing oral history project National Life Stories, and has recently completed an interview with Fabian Peake for the same project. She has published on numerous artists including Phyllida Barlow, Micheal Dean, Paul Neagu, and William Turnbull. Her ongoing research interest is the relationship between modern and contemporary sculpture and literature.

This paper explores DébaTunisie, a political blog launched anonymously in 2007, as a digital site of protest art and a living archive of dissent in postcolonial Tunisia. Through the multimodal work of the anonymous cartoonist Z, the blog offers satirical visual-textual interventions that document and contest authoritarianism, colonial legacies, and sociopolitical taboos. Hedi Nairi proposes reading DébaTunisie as a form of online archives of Tunisian cyberactivism – its recurring symbols, grotesque figures, and affective metaphors operate as sculpted memory in the digital sphere, capturing the ephemeral yet powerful energies of revolt, repression, and resistance.

The blog’s multimodal language, which blends caricature, satire, and inter-emiotic play, functions both as public art and as an activist record of Tunisia’s shifting political terrain. It engages a digital counter-public through comments, shares, and remixes, reconfiguring the boundary between political participation and cultural expression. This research draws on a longitudinal archive of over 900 blog entries and 1200 cartoons to analyse how protest is shaped, remembered, and archived online.

This presentation contributes a Global South perspective to the conversation on art and activism, foregrounding how non-institutional archives and digital aesthetics challenge official histories and reimagine protest as a form of alternative memory and an identity built through a participatory longitudinal act of meaning making. It reflects on what it means to preserve digital dissent, and asks how activist blogs – once marginal – can now guide new approaches to curating, archiving, and theorising protest art in an era of disappearing democracies and proliferating screens.

Dr Asma Hedi Nairi is a Tunisian scholar, writer, and human rights advocate specialising in digital activism, political satire, and visual dissent in North Africa. She is currently completing her book, Z & DébaTunisie: Blogging, Cartooning and Documenting Contemporary Tunisia, a multimodal study of political satire as a form of protest and historical memory. Hedi Nairi holds a PhD in International Relations and works with the International Detention Coalition alongside teaching at Sabanci University. Her research bridges critical discourse analysis, visual semiotics, and memory studies, exploring how digital media reshape the aesthetics, temporality, and archival potential of political resistance.

This paper examines how post-internet documentary practices function as expanded sculptural archives of protest, foregrounding identities often rendered invisible within Britain’s cultural and political landscape. In Yarli Allison’s SEAFARERS 2020-23, the precarious labour of Asian migrant seafarers is re-imagined through 3D environments and speculative testimony. The work operates as digital sculpture, layering memory, affect and data to construct a counter-archive of hidden protest. Similarly, Nguyen Trinh Thi’s Letters from Panduranga 2015 addresses archival silences around Vietnam’s Cham communities, combining landscape, oral accounts and historical fragments in a spatially sculptural mode that unsettles state narratives.

Together, these practices show how digital sculpture and experimental archives make protest affective as well as effective. By sculpting spaces of memory that are sensorial, ephemeral and collective, they challenge the under-representation of East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) identities. While the 2021 UK Census records over 2.2 million people of Asian heritage, ESEA communities remain statistically and discursively under-acknowledged, often subsume under the ‘Other Asian’ category in equality monitoring frameworks.

In parallel, Huh’s curatorial work as Migration Matters Festival employed body mapping workshops as collective archives of lived protest, reinforcing how the expanded sculptural field can document identities excluded from official records. Drawing on Rosalind Krauss’s ‘expanded field’ and Ann Laura Stoler’s ‘archival silences’, the paper argues these practices do not merely document protest but enact it, re-sculpting the archive as a porous site where marginalised histories become visible.

Nam Huh is a curator/PhD candidate at Loughborough University. Their doctoral project, Other-Minority Group: Documentary Films on Asian Immigrants after the Post-Internet Era, investigates the representation of East and Southeast Asian migrants in experimental documentary and post-internet practices, including VR, AI and interactive media. Recent curatorial projects include Shifting Realities at Migration Matters Festival 2025 and Echoes from Elsewhere at No Bounds Festival 2025. They have presented research at SOAS, Queen Mary University, UEA, the MeCCSA Postgraduate Conference, and the British Chinese Association Conference. Earlier this year they completed a curator residency at Fire Station Artist’s Studios, Dublin.

Harry Jelley is an artist and producer specialising in creatively telling heritage stories. With over a decade of experience working in museums, he is particularly interested in co-creation, and contemporary artists working in heritage spaces and with heritage stories. He is currently a Heritage Producer with Bradford 2025, working across museums projects locally, nationally, and internationally. He is also Co-Director of Edible Archives and a director of People’s Property Portfolio: Bradford.

This paper theorises the pose and gesture as sculptural forms of resistance; living, breathing, and inherently ephemeral, whose power lies in their transcultural legibility beyond linguistic order. Focusing on Iran’s Woman, Life, Liberty movement, it interprets three gestural acts as temporary sculptures that move from streets to screens and into shared archives of ‘globital’ memory.

First, the repeated image if the Baluchi protester Khodanour Lojje’ii, bound with outstretched arms toward a distant water bottle, crystallised oppression and endurance; its representation across performance, drawing, and sculpture highlights how a pose gains material afterlives. Second, the widely circulated video of allegedly Hadis Najafi tying her hair moments before she was killed condensed women’s bravery into a compact, repeatable gesture that became a symbol of resolve. Third, footballer Saeed Piramoon’s pantomimed hair-cutting on the pitch signalled a public alliance of genders and communities, showcasing solidarity as a sculptural sign in motion.

Connecting art history, memory studies, and media studies, this paper promotes ‘gestural semiotics of resistance’ as a form of non-verbal protest and explores how such acts are documented, curated, and preserved. It examines the aesthetics of protest, the sensory experience of the ephemeral, and the blurry boundary between mass action and art creation. Focusing on repetition, remediation, and algorithmic circulation, we argue that these gestures quickly become part of a community’s shared digital archive and, over time, its collective memory. The paper ends with suggestions for curatorial and archival strategies to maintain the evidentiary, emotional, and sculptural aspects of protest gestures.

This proposal was submitted jointly by Raika Khorshidian, AvH Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Bonn and Raha Khademi, PhD Candidate, University of Bonn.

Raha Khademi is an arts and visual culture writer and researcher based in The Hague, Netherlands. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the Kunsthistorisches Institut, University of Bonn, where her work investigates Iranian diasporic art and cultural memory. She completed her MA with first-class honours at the Faculty of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London, and holds an MFA from Hanze University in the Netherlands. She is the managing editor of the Kaarnamaa Institute of Art and Visual Culture, an independent institute dedicated to studying global modern and contemporary art and visual culture.

In 1990, during Eastern Europe’s democratic transformation, students at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest staged a short-lived revolution. Its traces survive in a single cardboard box in the university archive. Among the documents is a stamped sheet signed by dozens of students, referring to a spontaneous action: with chalk, they inscribed on the entrance steps three names proposed for the school’s new leadership. The administration condemned it as vandalism and threatened expulsion.

An official record in the archives states that the chalk drawing of May 24, 1990, was executed by the following individuals, noting how responsibility was shared; each letter was drawn by a different student, who signed to authenticate the ‘damage’. This double-gesture – the writing and the co-signing – became an emblematic act of collective implication, later read as a symbolic statement of the student revolt. This record became central to Rebels 2017, an installation by a Hungarian artist duo, Little Warsaw. The copy of the archival document was left untreated with fixative and exposed to the red light of a temporary darkroom, where both the leaders’ names and the students’ signatures slowly faded.

By activating this archival fragment, the work aligns with contemporary practices of intervention and re-enactment that revisit the legacy of student revolts. At once, the artwork offers a metaphor for the symbolic disappearance of the uprising and the incompleteness of regime change, while raising questions about the importance of collectivity and the radicalism of common action. These approaches may also help map the shared patterns of student movements

Dr Eszter Lázár is an independent curator and associate professor at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest, where she teaches in the Department of Art Theory and Curatorial Studies. She was the co-curator of Waiting Room – Women Healers and Patients (2021) and currently co-leads the project ‘Beyond Bare Life. Neglected by Institutionalized Care’ with Edina Nagy. She co-edited the online Curatorial Dictionary (tranzit.hu), contributed to RomArchive (2016-19), and has been a member of the curatorial team of OFF-Biennale Budapest, participating in documenta fifteen. Her recent collaborative publications include Approximating Borders: Artistic Research in Practice (2023) and Beyond Bare Life (2025). Her research focuses on critical art, art education, institutional history, and artistic research.

When is a lock-on illegal? Two years after the V&A’s Disobedient Objects exhibition in 2015, in which protest tools were displayed as design objects, the Stansted 15 were arrested for their action obstructing the departure of a plane. The V&A had offered not only visibility – as aesthetic, functional and sculptural objects – to key tools within protest movements, but also offered ‘How To’ guides: free to take manuals on, amongst others, how to make your own bike block or lock-on. Yet, whilst the design and display was legal within the frame of a cultural exhibition, the original function of the lock-on was (and is) deemed illegal.

This paper takes this case as its starting point to explore how museum collections can function as radical archives, and how this intersects with conservation and access protocols. I focus on objects with an instructional quality, where the protest or embodied sculpture element is not ‘part’ of what the museum owns. Considering the Disobedient Objects How To guides, alongside Amgueddfa Cymru’s collection of songsheets and protest placards, most notable from Greenham Common, this paper then close reads specific protests that occurred shortly after each item was displayed, in relation to ideas around ‘bodies in alliance’ as a form of political space (Butler, 2011). Rather than accepting conservation limitations as an archival deadening of protest objects/prompts, this paper explores through these two examples how protest items in which the prompted form relies on human bodies as part of the sculpture/action, can complicate and enable contradictory forms of preservation and agency for future audiences.

Dr Sophie Mak-Schram is trained as an art historian and experiential educator, whose practice spans artistic practice, art historical research and radical pedagogies. They completed a Mare Skłodowska-Curie-funded PhD about radical forms of learning in practices we might recognise as ‘art’ between 2021 and 2024. They engage others in place and object-specific work around power, collectivity, knowledges and futures. Often using the metaphor of  the ‘tool’ – as a poetic and practical object – Mak-Schram works with collaborators to make tools that can shift power, gather groups and offer ways of being in relation (to each other, to place, to institutions) differently.

This paper examines the gay collective Gran Fury as a crucial case study for understanding how visual strategies of queer protest blurred the boundaries between art, activism, and public intervention during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Emerging in New York in 1988 as an offshoot of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), Gran Fury used billboards, posters, postcards, and guerilla graphics to denounce governmental inaction and public stigma surrounding the health crisis. Their celebrated works – including Kissing Doesn’t Kill 1989 and The Government Has Blood on Its Hands 1988 – employed homoeroticism, irony, and advertising-inspired languages to assert the visibility of the queer community at a moment when homosexuality was pathologised and people living with AIDS were vilified.

While situating Gran Fury’s practice within a broader genealogy of queer visual activism during the epidemic, this paper focuses specifically on The Pope Piece, presented in 1990 in the ‘Aperto 90’ section of the 44^th Venice Biennale. The work consisted of two large posters juxtaposing an image of Pope John Paul II with a phallic photograph and slogans criticising the Catholic Church’s stance on AIDS, generating intense controversy and censorship attempts. Aligned with his postdoctoral research on the political role of homoerotic imagery during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, this case illustrates how Gran Fury mobilised sexuality and provocation not as gratuitous offence, but as a powerful tool to expose the deadly consequences of moralistic policies. Moreover, The Pope Piece – like other projects by the collective – resonates strongly with contemporary debates on the preservation of protest memory. Originally conceived as an ephemeral intervention, the work now circulates in archives and museum collections, raising pressing questions about how to safeguard the sensorial, collective, and performative dimensions of activist art.

Dr Stefano Mudu holds a PhD in Visual Culture from luav University of Venice and is currently a research fellow at the University of Bergamo, where he studies the role of images in protest contexts, with a focus on visuality during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. His work explores strategies of enactment and re-enactment in contemporary art and the intersections of art history with queer theory, feminism, colonialism, and ecology. He has collaborated with major institutions, including the Venice Biennale, SITE Santa Fe, and the New Museum. Author of Spazi Critici (2018), he is completing his second monograph on reactivation strategies in art.

This paper examines mail art as both a feminist practice and a form of protest that challenges institutional boundaries while generating its own archival legacies. Emerging in the 1970s alongside the women’s liberation movement, mail art provided women with an accessible and democratic medium through which to resist social and artistic marginalisation. Drawing on archival material from the Postal Art Event (1975-77) and Patricia Collins’ Women and Mail Art project (1997), this paper explores how women artists and housewives transformed domestic spaces into political sites of creative exchange.

The Postal Art Event encouraged women to create small works at their kitchen tables, using everyday materials such as recycled packaging, crochet, and lace. By circulating these objects through the post, participants forged networks of solidarity that turned domestic labour into a site of political critique, enacting what Rozsika Parker called ‘long-distance consciousness-raising.’ In Collins’ project, participants interrogated women’s under-representation in the historiography of mail art, while producing works that critically reimagined domestic craft, such as collaged textiles and faux stamps.

Both projects highlight the tension between ephemerality and preservation: while much mail art has been lost due to its transient nature, archives such as the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths now safeguard these practices. Situating mail art within debates on protest, materiality, and archiving, this paper argues that feminist uses of mail art illuminate broader questions about how ephemeral practices of protest can be sustained and remembered within the archive.

Xinyu (Cici) Shi is an MA student in History of Art at University College London. Her research examines feminist and decolonial artistic practices, with a focus on the intersections of care, materiality, and political memory. Her dissertation explores Cecilia Vicuña’s Saborami 1973 as an ethical and decolonial response to political violence, expanding the possibilities of the artist’s book as a site of memory, intimacy, and solidarity. Rather than articulating a manifesto, Saborami mobilises intimacy, vulnerability, and poetic experimentation to create a fragile yet enduring record of survival. More broadly, her work investigates how small-scale, process-based, and relational practices reimagine art’s social and ethical capacities in modern and contemporary contexts.

The Museum of Transology (MoT) is the largest material culture collection relating to trans, non-binary and intersex lives in the world. Stored at the Bishopsgate Institute, London the archive currently stands at over 3,000 objects spanning from explicitly gender affirming items (chest binders, hormone replacement therapy packets, worn dresses) to the seemingly mundane objects (pebbles, toys, books, goggles) that carry profound personal significance. Through community collecting, each object has been donated by transgender, non binary and intersex individuals and has attached a brown swing tag inscribed with a handwritten note from the donor explaining the item’s significance.

The MoT functions as both historical archive and political barometer through its systematic preservation of transgender material culture. This paper examines how the collection simultaneously documents transgender existence and tracks the intensifying global backlash against our community. Analysis of acquisition patterns reveals how the archive inadvertently maps the trajectory from isolated transphobic incidents to coordinated cross-national campaigns.

By interrogating how these objects bear witness to shifting cultural attitudes, we demonstrate how marginalised communities can deploy archival practice as resistance against erasure, creating tangible evidence that outlasts temporary, incomplete or disingenuous political narratives while providing researchers with invaluable data on the relationship between material culture and trans communities under threat.

Turner will draw upon three separate examples (surgical remnants in formaldehyde, a dialogue between dresses of trans women of colour and our protest placard collection) which represent how transgender archival practices transcend documentation to become powerful tools of political intervention and community survival.

Chloe Turner is currently completing a PhD with the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths University of London on transgender disinformation. Turner is an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, London and the Governance and Policy Lead at the Museum of Transology. Turner’s work on trans politics has been supported by Visiting Research Fellowships at ISERP, Columbia University, New York USA (2023) and the Chair of Transgender Studies at University of Victoria,  B.C. Canada (2024). Their writing can be found/forthcoming in European Journal of Cultural Studies, Media Theory, Sociological Review, Culture Health and Sexuality and The Geographical Journal among other places. www.chloeturner.info

Sophia Yadong Hao is Director & Principal Curator of Cooper Gallery, Reader in Curatorial Practice at the University of Dundee, and Visiting Professor at the University of Sunderland. Employing a rhizomatic approach, Hao’s practice situates exhibition making as a critical inquiry, feminist ethos as curatorial method, and alternative art pedagogies as a radical praxis of decolonised knowledge creation. Notable curatorial projects include NOTES on a return (2009), a re-contextualisation of performance art from 1980s Britain; Of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event? (2016-17) that evokes the ethos of feminism for an alternative politics in culture and society; and The Ignorant Art School: Five Sit-ins Towards Creative Emancipation (2021-25) a five-phase exhibition programme examining histories and future possibilities of creative pedagogy as a radical emancipatory praxis. Hao is founding editor of the digital publication What I am Reading Now… Her publications include Of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event? (Sternberg Press 2019), Hubs and Fictions (Sternberg Press 2016), A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE (2015), and NOTES on a return (2010). Hao was named one of The List’s Hot 100 in 2024: The Most Influential Scottish Cultural Contributors.