WE (Not I) convenes four days and nights of discursive meetings, presentations, and events that bring together a wide range of female artists, writers, curators and thinkers identifying with feminist practices to exchange and produce content addressing questions around the role of "we" in contemporary art practice. WE (Not I) has been organized by the artist Melissa Gordon and the writer Marina Vishmidt, who have together previously, with Kaisa Lassinaro, produced the publications LABOUR (2011) andPERSONA (2013). The first iteration of WE (Not I) took place with a different group of participants in April 2015 in London, at South London Gallery, Flat Time House and Raven Row. Some of the content developed during both sessions of WE (Not I) will be published in a series of magazines in 2015/16 edited by Gordon and Vishmidt. 

The event will consider the construction, performance and broadcast of gender archetypes over the last fifty years and how these have been transformed, critiqued and subverted within visual art – specifically in the work of Judith Bernstein, Dara Birnbaum and Joan Jonas. They were part of a generation of women artists who began working in the 60s and 70s, and were pioneers in their radical address of subjectivity, imagery, artistic processes and technology. Within the wider social and political context, their work contained a powerful message of transformation that was extremely prescient: firstly, in relationship to writing by theorists such as Judith Butler and Donna Haraway in the early 90s; and, more recently, the digital and virtual revolution’s effect on identity construction and performance.

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