still i rise [act 1 ]
nottingham contemporarynottingham, UK | 10/27/2018 - 01/27/2019
a major group exhibition designed by f-architecture that explores the role women have played in the history of resistance movements and alternative forms of living.
Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance situates women and queerness at the center of a historical arc of protest and the cultivation of alternative forms of living. Disbanding with fixed chronologies and static identities, the exhibition assembles thematic moments across a global situation of resistance: from intimate acts to large-scale uprisings, from the late 19th century to the present and beyond. We collaborated with curators to prepare this conceptual organization, the exhibition design and gathering spaces for two stagings of the show.
Free-standing wall sections, niches, and furniture scaled to both the body and the crowd form the exhibition infrastructure. Their composite assemblies provide different atmospheres and mounting strategies for a diverse set of materials: a stretched fabric folding into a double-faced wall is a tactile surface for viewing and touching. Detailing across these soft surfaces evidence the labor of the body seen elsewhere in the exhibition, in banners and other textile works. “Curtain walls” undulate to provide an open interiority, but perform stature and solidity where it’s needed. Plywood is also hung, its edge expressed at the walls open end as it wraps over top its framing. These steel frames appear throughout the exhibition in multiple permutations: in a more substantial wall structure, in slight legs for the ribbon-like tables, in the armature for the stretched fabric niche. Somewhere between the living room and the street, the gallery opens another forum for the continued discourse of resistance.
curatorial | exhibition design
a project of f-architecture
partners: virginia black, gabrielle printz curators: irene aristizábal, rosie cooper, cédric fauq
