利兹大学美术馆
Animated Activism: Women Empowered
The problem
An archive exhibition can sit in a gallery for eleven months and never reach the students it is about. Objects do not draw an audience on their own; a programme does.
In short
Programming a year-long exhibition on five decades of feminist campaigning, and building the multimedia campaign that brought students inside it.
- 11
- Months on public display
- 10+
- Student societies in the podcast series
- 3
- Archive and advocacy partners
The exhibition traced fifty years of campaigning by two organisations: Women’s Aid Federation of England, founded in 1974, and Leeds Animation Workshop, founded in 1978. It was told through newsletters, posters, badges, march photographs, hand-painted animation cels and scripts.
The programming problem was reach. Archive material rewards people who are already interested. Getting everyone else through the door meant giving student societies a reason to have their own conversation about it, which is what the podcast series was for: ten-plus societies, talking about the material in their own terms rather than the gallery’s.
The partnerships were the harder half. Three organisations with different archives, different sensitivities and different ideas of what the exhibition was for, all needing to recognise themselves in the result.