REALITY CHECK: A SYMPOSIUM ON ART, PSYCHO-POLITICS AND THE LIMITS OF
COMMUNITY
19 th
March 2016
Symposium organised by Larne Abse Gogarty and Giulia Smith
UCL History of Art Department
Seminar rooms 3&4
20 Gordon Square
London, WC1H 0AH
There is limited space for this event, to register please email: realitychecksymposium@gmail.com
PROGRAMME:
2
–2:30pm
Reality Check: Introduction
Giulia Smith and Larne Abse Gogarty
2:30 –3:15pm
“One body to another body”, Sexuality and Psyche in Direct Art and Feminist Actionism
Rose-Anne Gush
3:15
–4:15pm
Revisiting Red Therapy
Under the Moon in Conversation with Lucy Goodison, formerly of Red Therapy.
4:15
–4:45pm
Tea Break
4:45
–6:15pm
Questions of Presence
Rehana Zaman and Gail Lewis
6:15
–7:15
Drinks reception
Speaker bios:
Rose-Anne Gush is a PhD candidate in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural
Studies at the University of Leeds. Her thesis is provisionally titled Artistic Labour of the
Body: Austrian Postwar Feminist Art, Aesthetic Theory and Psychoanalysis. This research explores artist VALIE EXPORT and writer Elfriede Jelinek, attending to the relation of artistic labour to the body and to what has come to be cal led “body art”; new technologies in art that break with Modernism and philosophical conceptions of artistic labour highlighted by these works. This research also questions the role of "the body" in the philosophies of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno among others.

Gail Lewis is an academic and psychotherapist. Her political subjectivity was formed in the intensities of black feminist and anti-racist struggle and through a socialist, antiimperialist lens. She was a member of the Brixton Black Women's Group and one of the founder members of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent. She has written on feminism, intersectionality, the welfare state, and racialised-gendered experience. She is an Arsenal fan.
Under the Moon is a discussion group co-founded by Sophie Jones, Hannah Proctor and
Amy Tobin dedicated to exploring the marginalised utopian impulse. Under the Moon meets regularly at May Day Rooms, London.
Red Therapy had its origins within left libertarian activist groups in London in the 1970s, including East London Big Flame, and responded to the strains of living and organising collectively. Red Therapy was an experiment that sought to produce a form of free, leaderless, self-help therapy in order to address the relationship between psychic life and politics.
Rehana Zaman is an artist based in London working with moving image and live performance. Her work considers the interplay of multiple social dynamics that constitute subjects along particular socio-political formations. These narrative based artworks, often deadpan and neurotic, are generated through conversation and collaboration with others.
Solo exhibitions include ‘Some Women, Other Women and all the Bittermen’
(commissioned by The Tetley, Leeds, 2014) and ‘I, I, I, I and I’ (commissioned by Studio
Voltaire, London, 2013). Group exhibitions and screenings include Contemporary Art
Tasmania, The Irish Film Institute, Dublin, Berwick Film and Media Festival, The
Showroom, Tenderpixel and Whitechapel Gallery, London, Projections Art Rotterdam,
Konsthalle C, Stockholm and Baro, São Paolo. She was awarded a British Council research grant with Museo de Art Carrillo Gil, Mexico City in 2015 and a Gasworks
International Fellowship to Beirut in 2013. Zaman was a LUX Associate Artist in 2012/2013 and completed her MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths in 2011.