Music & Liberation 

All rights reserved. All images Copyright Space Station Sixty-Five, The WLM Music Archive and Jan Martin & John Walmsley

An Exhibition about Women's Liberation Music Making in the UK (1970-1989)

Music & Liberation: Women’s Liberation Music Making in the UK, 1970 -1989 shows how feminists used music as an activist tool to entertain and empower women during the 1970s and ‘80s.

Featuring the work of Jam Today, the Northern Women’s Liberation Rock Band, Feminist Improvising Group, Ova, the Fabulous Dirt Sisters, Abandon Your Tutu, the Mistakes and many more, the exhibition brings together a diverse collection of women’s cultural heritage. Music & Liberation will inspire and inform contemporary audiences about the politics of music making.

The exhibition will showcase rare ephemera and artefacts such as posters, songbooks, t-shirts, instruments and fliers. Visitors will be able to watch films, interact with installations, look at photo- graphs and, of course, listen to music. This is a unique opportunity to listen to unreleased recordings of practices, live performances and studio tracks from women musicians yet to be discovered by contemporary audiences.

Ten oral histories, which have been collected especially for the project, will also be available to listen to and watch. Music & Liberation: A Compilation of Music from the Women’s Liberation Movement will be sold at the exhibition. - Deborah M. Withers

Programmed events:
• Opening Event on 30 November: Legendary folk singer Frankie Armstrong will sing a few songs and Jude Alderson, founder of cult performance act the Sadista Sisters will share her memories.
• 8 December: The inaugural Queer Zine Fest London, 12-7pm. With its own programme of talks and DJ’s
• 8 December - 13 January: An exhibition of posters from Melanie Maddison’s Shape & Situate fanzine of inspirational women.
• Closing Events - 13 January: A conversation with Barby Asante, founder of the South London Black Music Archive, and exhibition curator Deborah Withers about community memories, generational transmissions and music. Chaired by Tom Perchard, author of Lee Morgan – His Life, Music and Culture. Plus, screening of a documentary on The Gluts. Comprising Hayley Newman, Gina Birch and Kaffe Matthews, The Gluts are an all-female troupe of activists/artists/musicians. Followed by a Q&A, and the showing of Gluts’ pop videos.
http://www.spacestationsixtyfive.com/exhibitions_and_projects.php?project_id=134