Paloma Proudfoot

Contested Bodies is a group exhibition curated by Marcelle Joseph and Laura Claveria that interrogates and celebrates the performativity of gender as a social construct. It understands gender as a cultural fiction with no fixed, natural or innate characteristics, but as an act that is performed and reproduced at individual, societal and institutional levels. Runs from 25 October 2023 to 6 April 2024 at the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK.

In this exhibition that appropriates the title of Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1989 non-fiction collection, Dancing at the Edge of the World, the works of ten female-identifying artists create a centre of subversive feminist activity where the body – fleshy, often leaky and sometimes desirous - is omnipresent but never separated from the mind. The artists in this exhibition invade their own privacy to explore embodiment and representation in an anarchic and self-realising strategy of empowerment. Artists include: Saelia Aparicio, Charlotte Colbert, Monika Grabuschnigg, Zsófia Keresztes, Alexi Marshall, Florence Peake, Proudick (Lindsey Mendick and Paloma Proudfoot), Megan Rooney and Eve Stainton.