Book Launch: Art, Feminism, and Community and Showing Resistance, 29 April 2025
The Centre for Design History is proud to announce new books by its members, Ceren Özpınar and Harriet Atkinson. Join us for a joint book launch to hear from the authors about their respective projects and to celebrate their success.
April 29, 5.30pm, University of Brighton (City Campus), M2, Grand Parade Main Building: 58–67 Grand Parade, BN2 0JY
Free and open to all.
Art, Feminism, and Community: Feminist Art Histories from Turkey, 1973-1998 by Ceren Özpınar (Oxford University Press and British Academy, 2024) examines the lives and communities of artists and their works from Turkey. It brings together several artists (including Tomur Atagök, Inci Eviner, Jûjîn, Gülsün Karamustafa, and Nil Yalter) in a world of multifaceted relationships that influence the creation of new art.
Uncovering familial, professional, and friendship links, it recreates transnational networks, intellectual collectives, political alliances, and ethnic communities. It demonstrates how artists have analysed their own experiences in their works, reflecting the effects of their communities and lives, and detailing rarely seen paintings, installations, photographs, drawings, batik, and performance art from 1973 to 1998.
Dr. Ceren Özpınar is a Senior Lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Brighton. Her research centres on questions of gender, sexuality, race, and transnational networks and communities in modern and contemporary art of Turkey, the Middle East, and their diasporas. She is the co-editor of Under the Skin: Feminist Art and Art Histories from the Middle East and North Africa Today (OUP, 2020), and the author of The Art Historiograrphy in Turkey (1970-2010) (Tarih Vakfi, 2016).
Showing Resistance: Propaganda and Modernist Exhibitions in Britain, 1933-53 by Harriet Atkinson (Manchester University Press, 2024) examines how exhibitions became a potent tool for public communication in early twentieth-century Britain. It delves into the use of exhibitions as manifestos, weapons of war, and means of signalling political solidarities during a critical period from 1933-53.
Showing Resistance tackles contemporary public concerns by examining the histories of propaganda, protest, and the refugee experience. It highlights how artists and designers engaged with politics, offering insightful analyses of crucial but often overlooked episodes in British political history. This richly illustrated book draws on dozens of examples of exhibitions mounted in unconventional venues such as empty shops, workers’ canteens, and station ticket halls. It reveals how these exhibitions, created by significant figures, played a vital role in shaping public discourse.
Dr. Harriet Atkinson is an AHRC Leadership Fellow and Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton.
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