Rachel Garfield presents a curated selection of films by experimental feminist filmmakers from the 1970s.

In her book Experimental Filmmaking and Punk, Garfield explores rebellious, feminist Punk audio-visual culture of the 1970s tracing its roots and its legacies. Just as punk created a space for bands such as The Slits and Poly Styrene to challenge 1970s norms of femininity through a transgressive, strident new female identity, it also provoked experimental feminist filmmakers to initiate a parallel, lens-based challenge to patriarchal modes of filmmaking.

The films in this screening were part of a rebellious, feminist punk audiovisual culture. In their filmmaking and their performed personae, film and video artists such as Vivienne Dick, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Ruth Novaczek, Anne Robinson, Sarah Turner, and Jill Westwood (all of whom will be screened) offered a powerful, deliberately awkward alternative to hegemonic conformist femininity, creating a new punk audiovisual aesthetic.

Rachel Garfield is Professor in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art. Garfield exhibits and screens her films regularly (ICA in the London Short Film Festival 2023, Designathon 2023, Zurich, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin and The Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Hatton Gallery, Newcastle; Beaconsfield Gallery Vauxhall, London; Focal Point, London Short Film Festival and Open City Doc Festival and The Babylon Cinema Berlin, Espaciocentre, Tenerife Espacio De Les Artes, CCA Santa Fe, Arizona State University Museum, Aqua Art Fair Miami). Garfield also publishes extensively in journals and anthologies. She is co-editor of the monographs Dwoskino: The Gaze of Stephen Dwoskin (LUX, 2022) and Experimental Filmmaking and Punk: Feminist Audio-Visual Culture of the 1970s and 1980s (Bloomsbury, 2022), and has curated screenings at Metrograph New York (2022); e-flux Screening Room New York (2022), AEMI, Dublin (2022); BFI, London Experimenta (2022,2024); ICA London Short Film Festival (2022); Bristol Experimental Expanded Film (2018); Frankfurtfilmkollectiv (2013).