Bitch Magic

About

The exhibition brings together a cross-generational group of women and non-binary artists who align with ‘the feminine’ and whose work offers radical feminist perspectives through themes associated with folklore, the magical, or the esoteric. The works in the exhibition span a variety of media–sound installation, performance, painting, drawing, photography and sculpture.

Recent interpretations of a resurgence of magical thought in historical and contemporary art practices position these tendencies as an escapist projection, or withdrawal from present realities. While offering perhaps an insight, such readings flatten out the diversities of positions around art practices engaging with magical thinking. Bitch Magic explores links between ‘the feminine’ and magic, which I believe can lead to novel and more inclusive directions for feminist discourses. 

Far from being restricted to the binary structure of sexual difference in which the term originates, ‘the feminine’ here becomes a conceptual tool subject to a magical transmutation of meaning. This materialises in an unfixed approach to both form and language, a critique sharpened by humour, celebrations of fluid and hybrid subject positions, desire, and the ecstatic uncanny. While using the idiom of magic, the works in Bitch Magic offer positions where ‘the feminine’ might be enacted at the service of feminist and queer theory.