Exhibits,

Rachael Haynes Troubling Language

Rachael Haynes’ practice engages with feminist ethics and activism by examining the social and personal constructs of language and gender.

The exhibition “Troubling Language” is part of Haynes’ ongoing “Project for the Affirmation of the Voice”, which addresses the polyvocal nature of contemporary feminism. The works draw on revisionist strategies to address the broader aim of the project: how can creative practice offer a feminist site of reclamation for voices of difference and work against patriarchal violence, which manifests as silencing and exclusion?

The works in the exhibition are focused on the intersections of language, gender politics and representation as observed in social practices, material archives and cultural texts. Taking as a starting point the provocation that, ‘small acts of resistance can create change’, this body of work draws specifically on protest language from feminist social history archives.

Rachael Haynes is an artist and academic based in Brisbane, Australia. She completed her PhD, an exploration of the ethics of exhibition practice, with the support of an Australian Postgraduate Award for research in 2009. Haynes is a founding member of the feminist art collective LEVEL, and their projects have been presented in Australia and internationally. She is also the Director of Boxcopy Contemporary Art Space and a lecturer in Visual Arts at the Queensland University of Technology, where she coordinates the advanced visual arts studio and is a co-leader of the Socially and Ecologically Engaged Practices program in the Creative Lab.

Photography by Christo Crocker.