Portuguese Art and Feminism in the Post-revolution Context

Lecture by CWAH 2016 Visiting Scholar Marcia Oliveira: Portuguese Art and Feminism in the Post-revolution Context

This lecture is part of the seminar series Art & Aesthetics, Center for Cultural Analysis

Abstract:
Portuguese Art and Feminism in the Post-revolution Context is the result of a diachronic research on women’s artistic production in Portugal in the 1960s and 1970s, until the 1974 Carnation Revolution that reinstated democracy in the country. This was a time of extraordinary paradigm changes all over the globe, but also a pressing time in terms of the Portuguese women artists’ participation in the national art scene, for they have led a remarkable movement from its margins to its center. In this presentation, I intend to introduce the main lines of this research, anchored in a discussion based in theories emerging from fields such as feminist studies and aesthetics, thus trying to map a lineage of feminist effects in Portuguese neo-avant-garde. The research hereby presented is based on a dialogical discussion around the art works and inherent artistic processes, questioning themes and paradigms such as canon, the relationship between feminism an aesthetics, figuration and abstraction, feminism as micro and macro-politics or diverse formal and conceptual formulations of space. In general terms, we present a re-reading of the Portuguese neo-avant-garde, deeply influenced by the radically altered role and position of women artists in the national context, in which a web of feminist traces, affects and effects, of political and aesthetic nature, can be excerpted.

Márcia Oliveria is a recipient of a FCT post-doctoral grant SFRH/BPD/110741/2015

Co-sponsors: Center for Cultural Analysis, Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities, Department of Art History, Department of History, and Department of Spanish and Portuguese