As a closing celebration of exhibition, A Simultaneity of Stories-so-far, we hosted a live performance of A Feminist Chorus / A Tender Map by artist Lucy Reynolds.
A Feminist Chorus / A Tender Map plots the creative geography of Grand Union, mapped through spoken and written word from people associated with the organisation. Gathered as sound files and word docs, walks around studios, workshops, gardens, galleries, and kitchens became a way of entering and honouring those spaces and the art being made within them, during a time when speaking together and entering public spaces has not been possible. The loose leaf score for A Feminist Chorus / A Tender Map designed by Rose Nordin brings together their words as a deconstructed publication, which the speaker/reader can reorder and remap.
We invites the public to come together with A Tender Map’s contributors, to hear and create A Tender Map chorus in situ at Grand Union for the first time. The performance took place outside at Minerva Works Garden.
A Tender Map is part of a wider ongoing project, A Feminist Chorus, which explores whether the feminist concept of collectivity associated to the Women’s movement in the 1970s might still have resonance for contemporary feminist art making. Previous choruses have invited speakers in different settings to lift the texts of women both iconic and forgotten off the page through their voices, embodying with pride women’s marginalised and dispersed history in the contemporary moment.
A simultaneity of stories-so-far is an exhibition of sound, video and writing by artists Lucy Reynolds, Navi Kaur and Holly Argent. Curated by Laura Onions and Alice O’Rourke, the project will re-consider acts of gathering and articulating collective stories. Cultivated throughout the last year, stories-so-far brings to attention how place is given resonance through joined together voices.
Lucy Reynolds makes art and writes about feminism, political space, moving image and collective practice. As an artist, her films and installations have been presented in galleries and cinemas internationally, and her ongoing sound work A Feminist Chorus has been heard at the Glasgow International Festival, the Wysing Arts Centre, the Showroom and The Grand Action cinema, Paris. She co-ordinates the PhD programme for the Centre for Research in Education, Art and Media (CREAM) at the University of Westminster, and runs the MRES in Creative Practice. She is editor of the anthology Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image, and co-editor of the Moving Image Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ).
