It Takes a Million Years to be a Woman: feminist communities

Explore alternative feminist communities and their legacies in contemporary artistic practice, through three moving image works that investigate different ways of being together:

Vivian Ostrovsky’s Allers-venues (France, 1984, 16mins) is an experimental film documenting a group of friends (women, chickens, dogs and cats) during a month in the French countryside over the summer. It was made on Super 8 and blown up to 16mm.

It Takes a Million Years to be a Woman (Sisters of Jam, Sweden, 2011, 14mins) is an experimental video installation on communal life at the Kate Millet Farm, an art colony for women in Poughkeepsie, USA, set up in 1978 and operational until 2012. Whilst Millet is best known for her ground-breaking 1970 book Sexual Politics, which became a manifesto for the 1970s Women’s Liberation Movement, she largely withdrew from public life, plagued by mental health issues for many years. Sisters of Jam visited the farm in 2010, writing: ‘A close friend of Millett told us that The Farm was a workshop of Kate’s mind’.

National Unity of Women (Azadeh Fatehrad, Germany, 2016, 20mins) is a documentary film which explores the activities of the feminist communities that emerged and developed following the socio-political changes in 1979 Iranian Revolution. It focuses on the National Unity of Women, the community led by Shahin Nawai that fought particularly hard to ‘rescue’ women and their status in Iranian society.

The screenings will be followed by a discussion with Azadeh Fatehrad (RCA), Ros Murray (King’s) and Amy Tobin (Cambridge).

Image: Kate Millet Farm, © Sisters of Jam, 2010, USA. Photo: Jane Winter

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/ahri/eventrecords/2017-2018/Festival/Wed18/It-Takes-a-Million-Years-to-be-a-Woman.aspx